Bill E. Burns

Bill E. Burns is a Canadian artist

In his work, Burns has often dealt with the fine line between the human and the animal, between civilised culture and wild nature, especially with the points where these realms collide, although Burns gives these collisions such an unexpected twist that they unveil the artificiality of making such divisions in the first place. His safety kits for animals, which resonate with the comfort items for prisoners, are a case in point. To preserve wildlife in nature, Burns gave animals a human advantage by refashioning common human safety equipment for the animal world, from life vests to gloves, from breathing masks to protective helmets. Like the prisoner kits, the animal kits have been scaled down, although this reduction allows small animals – beavers, frogs, squirrels – to fit into the human equipment. The prisoner kits, especially the outdoor cells that resemble animal compounds, reinvent such processes of adaptation: not fitting the human being into an animal world but forcing the human to live like an animal in human captivity. At Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta, the hallmarks of civilisation, like religious practise, come to fuse with the zoo keeper’s staple of cages and buckets. There was a strict code of conduct for the comfort items. If they were adapted for other ends – if towels, for example, were used to cover the eyes, due to constant lighting in cells – they were taken away, as a punishment for not using them in the proper, civilised manner.