Amanda Burnham: Civic Body

Amanda Burnham makes outsized wall drawings of cities culled (usually) from piles of paper scraps. Cities interest her as teeming containers for everything. She admires the adaptive sensibility of tinkerers, patchers, foragers, and those who make-do, like a friend who keeps bees in a 12’ x 12’ back yard, or my neighbors who know that the empty “mint house” down the street is a great source for all their spearmint needs. A conjoined block of back porches, cellular in appearance, but as various as its inhabitants, is her favorite view. Cities like this are worth aspiring to.  When she tears drawings down, the parts get stuffed into bags for eventual reuse in later drawings. A bank of rowhomes becomes a teetering television antenna, or a moveable type sign becomes a sidewalk. She values tape as both an adhesive and as a line. She rarely pictures people in her constructions, but people are not absent. Architecture interests her the moment it becomes humanized.