Gallery Talk: Trey Burns

Registration is FREE for Nasher Members and students; $10 for non-members (includes museum admission). In-person and open to the public. Advance registration requested (limited space available). 

Trey Burns’s Prairie Piece draws from his research into the landscape and ecology of North Texas to focus on the seemingly incongruent subjects of the Texas Blackland Prairie, artist Robert Smithson’s unrealized proposals for the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport (ca. 1966-67), and the legacy of the George W. Bush administration. A native of Atlanta, Burns settled in Dallas in 2018, when his interest in understanding the history and environment of his adopted home began. The artist’s past works have similarly reflected the investigative nature of his practice through installations that intertwine video, photography, architecture, and sculpture with both reverence and criticality toward his given subject. At the core of his interests is the boundary separating the human-made and natural worlds and all of the idiosyncrasies contained within that ever-fluctuating space: a flock of geese settling into a vast parking lot or extractive industries abutting nature preserves, for example. Burns’s most recent discoveries reveal a complex web of connections between and among the area’s ecologies, culture, and politics that are explored in Prairie Piece.