There’s been a lot of speculation on social media lately about how so many people have memory-holed the recent past, willfully forgetting the COVID-19 pandemic, among other things. Daryl Burtnett is not one of them.
In “Respite & Remembrance: Pandemic to Present,” the Montpelier artist pairs new works with “Gratitude in a Time of Loss,” his ongoing installation documenting the number of Vermonters who have died from COVID-19. Both experimental and elegiac, the show is on view at the Vermont Supreme Court Gallery in Montpelier.
In late summer 2020, Burtnett started folding washi paper into small packets, securing them with artist tape and submerging them in a tray of sumi ink. Unfolded, the paper wasn’t what he had hoped for, but something about both the process of making the folded packets and their tactile quality felt soothing to him, he recalled in an interview. Eventually, he realized that creating them was connected to his daily habit of listening to Statehouse briefings on Vermont’s death toll.
In the four years since, the packets have changed. They have been made from different kinds of paper and cardboard, including the brown backing-board of a bristol pad. Some are partially gessoed or have abstract scribbles. Color has crept into others: ochre, blue, lemon yellow. Some are tightly wrapped, and some have no tape at all. Some are singular, while others closely resemble their neighbors: They are made from a single piece of paper, painted and then cut into separate parts before being dipped in ink, their common visual style indicating two or three or eight people who were part of the same day’s tally.
A few packets have scraps of sheet music embedded in the surface, taken from a ruined hymnal Burtnett found on the street. He said he has written phrases in some of them, and a couple contain stones; one envelops a Polaroid. Their dimensions vary, but all are about the same size as the artist’s hand.
Each piece is pinned, in roughly chronological order, to one of six 4-by-8-foot panels that lean against the wall, each resting on granite cobblestone feet. Not part of past installations of “Gratitude,” those feet add literal heft and weight that the work deserves, transforming the panels from innocuous display into stelae. Their setting in the grand lobby of Vermont’s highest court adds to that effect — it’s not often that objects such as scrap cardboard carry the gravitas of a memorial.
Only two of the pieces in “Gratitude” refer to specific individuals: an elderly couple Burtnett read about who were sick together but died apart within 24 hours of each other. Thinking of them, he created two packets from a single piece of paper, then wrapped them together in wax paper before dipping them in the sumi ink bath.
Unwrapped, that wax paper became “Shroud,” one of the framed works in the show. Collaged onto butcher paper gessoed white, the black-and-white form floats, both cast off and demanding attention. It acts as a bridge to the other paintings in the exhibition, which are abstract but maintain the emotional tone set by “Gratitude.”
Burtnett was a photojournalist for many years before turning his camera to fine art. His new mixed-media works on paper reflect his longtime fascination with textures of decay, such as rust or crumbling concrete, which he photographed in earlier work. He spreads paint with squeegees and scrapes it back with credit cards. He uses the back of a paring knife to etch paper with lines that show through subsequent layers of ink or paint.
“Arrival,” a 25-by-33-inch framed piece, is primarily light sepia, like old parchment. A shock of white connects inky black and blocky indigo forms. Smaller marks float across the composition, sparkling thanks to Carborundum, which Bartnett sometimes adds to his paints. The whole thing is reminiscent of a traditional Japanese landscape.
Beside it on the wall, “Tsunami” carries that vibe into a smaller, 11-by-14-inch work, this one painterly, with a swirling, more centralized composition. A single thick line of paint collects in a ridge near the bottom of the work, broken by a ghostly drip that brings the eye up into the action.
“First Part of the Journey” veers close to landscape. A collection of dark, impenetrable, Robert Motherwell-ish forms loll on what could be a beach of scraped tans, whites and grays, while a lighter shape looms behind everything in the top two-thirds of the paper.
“You only notice the loss if you care about the presence.” Daryl Burtnett
In some of these works, such as “Ocho, Blue,” Burtnett’s technique makes a sense of loss manifest. Here, thicker dried lines of paint surround ghostly voids, as though the edges of a plate had rested there and left residue. Many of the works have the imprinted quality of monotype, though none of them is a print.
The show features one very large painting, “The Opposite of a Constellation,” a 4-by-11-foot horizontal work Burtnett created on the gallery floor for his 2021 solo show at the Front in Montpelier. It’s based on a memory of seeing his 10-year-old son out the window right before a big snowstorm. A flock of crows flew by, black spots on white, just as the snow started. Within minutes, “it was falling so thick I couldn’t even see my son,” Burtnett said. The painting explores the anticipation of loss, including the sense of things changing.
“You only notice the loss,” Burtnett said, “if you care about the presence.”
Many people have asked Burtnett when “Gratitude in a Time of Loss” will be finished, he said, and even expressed concern about it. The project was on hiatus for a while, after the state stopped regular reporting. But COVID-19 deaths continue to occur, despite the virus’ endemic status. Before this show went up, Burtnett found new ongoing weekly reports and started making packets again.
At the project’s outset, Vermont’s death toll was about 60. When Seven Days reviewed the work in a 2022 show at Susan Calza Gallery in Montpelier, the installation had 630 pieces. After our conversation last week, Burtnett was on his way to creating the 1,028th.
He doesn’t feel like he’s done yet, he said. While others may argue over whether the pandemic is over or we should still be in crisis mode, Burtnett sees the installation and the show as a whole as offering a different kind of message. “Let’s be OK with remembering,” he said. “Let’s be OK with paying attention.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Object Permanence | In “Respite & Remembrance,” Daryl Burtnett reflects on the pandemic and the present moment”
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2024.
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