"Dead Reckoning" Opening Reception

Opening Reception: Feb 27 from 4:30-7pm
Exhibition Run: Feb 27-Apr 4, 2026

Dead Reckoning brings together lens-based works that investigate the paternal side of Erin Elyse Burns’s ancestral heritage. From this position, her work considers how gender, work, immigration, incarnation, and war between nation states inform identity.

From visiting regional archives in the rural North of Ireland where paternal family originates, to navigating the National Archives of England, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, Burns has found the unearthing of information to be both an exercise in fact finding from primary source material and one of engaging with porous myths and untold stories. Time spent in the archives introduces complex inquiry into the gatekeeping of information and the particular barriers required to access historical objects.

In Dead Reckoning, Burns responds to and abstracts this material to consider the archetypal nature of roles played within her family. She uses repetitive physical movements to embody, remember, and release actions her family has performed. These gestures posit that somatic awareness has the ability to relinquish intergenerational trauma. This embodiment questions distinctions of female and male, young and old, past and present. These binaries blend, dissolve, and are interwoven with ideas of the mystical. While the impetus of the work is personal and specific, the content offers viewers a mirror to reflect on their own histories.