Kay Burns is a multidisciplinary artist who shares her time between Calgary, Alberta, and Newfoundland.  Her processes include work with audio, imagery, computer/electronic installation, locative-media, and performance art.  She has a strong interest in collaborative practices. She is a founding member of the Ministry of Walking (a collective involved in the practice of walking within individual and collaborative art explorations) and has been involved with the EMMAX collective (audio performance group).

 

Her work has been presented at venues nationally and internationally, including Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, AB; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, AB; Truck Gallery, Calgary, AB; St. John’s Sound Symposium, NL; Struts Gallery, Sackville, NB; Odd Gallery, Dawson City, YT; SAW Gallery, Ottawa, ON; Catalyst Arts, Belfast, Northern Ireland; Venturous Vanguard Video Festival, Los Angeles. She is also a freelance curator and writer.  She was the curator at the Muttart Public Art Gallery (now called the Art Gallery of Calgary) from 1995 – 1999, and she taught for 10 years through the University of Calgary Art Department and the Alberta College of Art & Design Media Arts and Digital Technologies Department.  

 

Her work is often site-specific and portrays a fascination with the relationship between humanity and place, site and memory; through processes of walking, collecting, recontextualizing, and categorizing. Sometimes the work will parody these processes as a curatorial or archival act leading to fictional/critical interpretations of information accumulation, construction, and delivery systems. Aspects of acoustic ecology play a role in her work as it deals with the relationship between social, cultural and environmental elements of sonic place.  Additionally, human geography is implied… human geography deals with motion and interaction within one’s environment; and looks at patterns and processes that shape that interaction.