The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) presents ‘A Bee his burnished Carriage‘, a solo exhibition by Artist-in-Residence Ian Burnley, on view from October 25, 2024, to January 11, 2025. Burnley’s exhibition features a series of cyanotypes and a two-channel video recorded on 16mm film and presented digitally.
Burnley uses cyanotypes, a 19th-century photographic technique closely tied to plant imagery, to refer to the coded ways people communicated during the Victorian era when certain species of flowers denoted hidden and symbolic meanings that were used to express complex emotions through carefully arranged bouquets.
Alongside the cyanotypes, Burnley presents a two-channel video installation inspired by daytime soap operas, which invites viewers to move through the space as a pollinator might move between blossoms. Soap operas present expansive, self-perpetuating stories in which beloved characters navigate complex, often absurd, plotlines. Within Burnley’s video, a series of vignettes play out across two screens as fictional characters project their emotions onto objects. These objects, in turn, become stand-ins for human passion.
The exhibition draws an unexpected connection between the natural world of flowers and the performative universe of soap operas. By pairing these seemingly disparate subjects, Burnley highlights how both flowers and melodramatic television shows are designed to capture attention and communicate intricate, often hidden messages. Burnley notes that “flowers serve as a ‘living advertisement’ to attract pollinators, much as soap operas have historically enticed viewers.”
