No Dress Rehearsal: Bobbie Burgers

Over the past several years, Burgers has developed a cyclical practice that moves between painting and collage. She begins by creating large-scale paintings on canvas, which she then photographs in high resolution to use as the basis for new compositions. Onto these smooth, printed surfaces, she paints, cuts, and collages – breaking apart her own imagery to reassemble into entirely new mixed-media collages. The process, at once playful and exacting, mirrors Burgers’ ongoing dialogue between control and chaos. She describes it as “managing the chaos,” creating multiple scenarios and defining them only in hindsight. Each collage is a visual puzzle of layered gestures and textures, where the original source is often obscured beyond recognition. Far from functioning as copies, the printed reproductions become new grounds for exploration, their subtle shifts in color and surface generating momentum that allows Burgers to open fresh windows into abstraction and construct three-dimensional illusions that inform her painting practice.