Artist Lecture No. 1 - Erik Burke

                I attended the guest lecture by Erik Burke on the 8^th of March, 2012.  Burke received a B.A. in Digital Media from UNR in 2005.  Since then he has been living in New York, while also taking extended trips around the world.

                Burke is primarily a street artist, dealing in various types of graffiti.  He began the lecture with an extensive history of contemporary graffiti and detailed his responses to that history.  Burk works in two basic modes with his graffiti: he has a simpler graphic “throw up”, which generally consists of a paper-airplane like form, sometimes rendered with a phrase along one line.  He often pairs this with his tag, “OverUnder”, or the shortened “OU”.  He also creates complex, surreal wheat-pastes and large scale murals that combine architectural elements with distorted human forms.  He has done murals at the behest of businesses, as well as on free walls and in public spaces.

                A few years ago, Burke and a fellow artist raised funds to go to Europe, where they completed a 3,000 mile bike ride from Portugal to Denmark.  They created and put up work on the way, and then had a gallery show in Copenhagen that dealt with the journey and the work produced on it.  This year, Burke and a group of artists travelled to India, where they put up dozens of wheat-pastes. 

                I personally really enjoy Burke’s work.  I think that his characterization of graffiti as essentially playful and rebellious is spot on, and I believe that many artists have created fantastic unsanctioned public pieces.  He moves beyond the idea of simple graffiti as a method of getting one’s name on a wall, and uses his work to tell stories and relate to the lives of the people in the surrounding neighborhoods.