Artist:
Victor Burgin (born 1941 in Sheffield, England; lives and works in San Francisco, California, USA).

Materials:
Digital projection work; 14 minutes 37 seconds.

Description:
“In Mirror Lake, Burgin contrasts the history of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Seth Peterson Cottage, located in what is now Mirror Lake State Park, Wisconsin, with that of the Winnebago culture and tribe, which was forcefully relocated from that same area to Nebraska in the late 19th century. Burgin’s work positions such architectural sites as the crystallization of our wishes and fears about the past, present, and future. The forgotten stories he illuminates, whether real or imagined, underscore that the built environment is not an isolated, physical construct, but rather a shifting perception layered with many different cultural histories.”
—”Victor Burgin: Midwest,” Christin Tierney website, 2016.

“Burgin’s use of a non-computerized film image instead of another frame of computerized imagery in Mirror Lake manipulates the conventions of what is “real” or “natural” and demands that we reevaluate the way we have read these images and narrative. Such a reflexive and interrupted, or fragmented, experience veers into the terrain of poetry, which thrives off a constant scrambling and reordering of its signs and symbols.”
—Phillip Griffith, “Artseen: Victor Burgin,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 4, 2016.