Janet Burchill

Janet Burchill (born 12 December 1955) is an Australian contemporary artist. She is known for her work across multiple disciplines such as painting, sculpture, installation, film, and her continued collaboration with Jennifer McCamley since the mid-1980s. Notably, Burchill's work has been collected and included in the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art.

Biography Burchill was born on 12 December 1955, in Melbourne, Victoria. She currently resides in Melbourne, where she continues her art practices.

Career Burchill studied Visual Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts. In 1983 she completed her Bachelor of Arts with an interest in sculpture and film. In these works, words such as: MUTE, RETURN, APORIA, and EQUIVALENCE are enamelled on aluminium and canvas boards to highlight the limits of language and representation. McCamley studied film, semiotics and philosophy, which supplemented Burchill's training in sculpture and film. They were both concerned with critiquing the histories of art, film, literature and culture, working through a feminist, psychoanalytic lens.

Influenced by the Pictures Generation (Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine) their early work, Temptation To Exist (Tippi) (1986) shows two film stills of Tippi Hedren after being attacked by birds in Hitchock's 1963 film, The Birds. The two stills are mounted on aluminium and separated by a black bar. Burchill and McCamley, through appropriated imagery, make reference to key ideas expressed in Laura Mulvey's 1973 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

In 1991, Burchill and McCamley were awarded the Australian Council's Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Residency and Scholarship and the duo lived and worked in Berlin until 1997. During this period, Burchill completed the photographic series Freiland. This series documented the changes an outdoor meeting area underwent both after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and over the decade they were photographed. The sad and stale appearance of these photographs allowed Burchill to illustrate the social and political divide East Germany experienced during this period. The site was constructed by Turkish immigrants that worked in Germany during the divide, and had not gained citizenship. These works were exhibited in 1997 and in 2017 at the National Gallery of Australia.

Throughout the early 2010s, Burchill's work was concerned with images and symbols from activism. Her 2013 exhibition in collaboration with McCamley, Legion, combines the iconic Guy Fawkes mask associated with the hacktivist group Anonymous, with tribal Papua New Guinean shields. 1982 Soft Geometry 1992 Dedication (Containment) 2005 SAFE 1984 Rites of Decay 1985 Virtually there; Super 8: Australian Perspecta '85 1990 Questions of Belief 1990 The Ready Made Boomerang

8th Biennale of Sydney 1995 Out of the Void: Mad and Bad Women 1995 In the Company of Women: 100 years of Australian Women's art from the Cruther's Collection 2001 Tip of the Iceberg: selected works from 1985 to 2001

UQ Art Museum and Ian Potter Museum of Art 2005 Neon

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2007 Turrabal-Jagera

University Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane 2008 Inland Empire

Solar Neon, IASKA, Western Australia 2011 A Different Temporality: Aspects of Australian Feminist Art Practice 1975-1985

Curated by Kyla McFarlane for Monash University Museum of Art 2013 Aesthetic Suicide

World Food Books, Melbourne and Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul 2015 Imaginary Accord

Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 2019 Temptation to Co-Exist

curated by Sue Cramer for the Heide Museum of Modern Art