Elijah Burgher

Region: Midwest

These large-scale paintings on canvas drop cloths incorporate ideas from magick and the occult, joined with considerations of how sexuality and desire may affect the creation of forms. Citing early twentieth-century occultist Austin Osman Spare’s system, I draw sigils—emblems encoding specific desires, to which magical power is imputed. The forms are painted roughly and quickly, usually with thinned-down acrylic and common paint rollers, indexing the body’s movement through space. Although the paintings are artifacts of personal rituals, I have begun thinking about them as units of a soft architecture—portable walls and floors with which to alter, partition, or otherwise reimagine existing spaces.