Anthony Burnham & Suzanne Dery
The Flators
The fairytale of The Flators goes something like this. Anthony Burnham and Suzanne Dery are multimedia artists who first began collaborating in 1993, while attending Concordia University in Montreal. They have been creating inflated vinyl sculptural works since 1995, while simultaneously being engaged in their individual art practices.
Born and raised in the suburbs of Montreal, Dery and Burnham share an aesthetic background which provided them with a common visual language and frames their critical approach. Their first inflated sculpture, Inflatable #1 (1995), was created using materials and tools found in their families' garage: a roll of clear plastic, thread, duct tape, a sewing machine, and a gas-powered leaf-blower. These materials have been refined and now form the trademark elements of the Inflatables.
Inflatable # 10, 1998
vinyle de piscine, plastique transparent, fil de nylon, souffleuse electrique
For several years, The Flators occupied a studio in Old Montreal overlooking the Lachine Canal. This provided them with privileged insight into the Montreal canal system and accompanying ships and locks: the machinations of urban waterways. In these spaces water is an element to be mediated, controled, and re-presented in a sanitised context that allows for its display, admiration, utilisation, and maintenance. These observations gave new direction to The Flators' work.
Inflatable #10 (1998) was a two-part, monumentally-scaled, site-specific piece exhibited at Quartier Ephémère in the fall of 1998. The sculpture was presented in the main exhibition space, where it took the form of a huge arrested "water" spill cascaded forth. And, flowing out from Burnham's second floor studio windows, the installation spilled like small waterfalls statically gushing onto the sidewalk below, a plastic simulation of the natural element of water, these artificial constructions imitate "nature" and cause us to question our relation to it.
Inflable #2, 1996
508 x 229 x 508 cm
sewn polyethylene, marker, gaz blower
Within view of Montreal's Lachine Canal, Dery and Burnham created a further transmogrification of this element of life, in dialogue with the water of the suburban imagination, and an antiquated urban waterway. From bath house, where they suspended Inflatable #6 above an empty swimming pool, to canal, to gallery space, water became a decorative element, a commodified art object that interrogates the role of the artist-as-creator, and the spectator's role in the consumption of both the art object and the element re-presented.
| exhibits | ||
| 1998 |  |
Inflatable #10, Quartier Ephemere, Montreal |
| 1997 | Concordia dance department, Spring Open House, Moise Hall, McGill University, Montreal Performance, interactive piece with Lauren Deglio & inflatable #9, Spring fever, Isart, Montreal |
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| 1996 | Inflatable #5 & Architecture in space, V.A.V Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal Aquatic Gala, an articule satellite project, Inflatable #6, Bain St-Michel, Montreal |
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