When I first saw the work of the young British artist Sam Burford I was immediately struck by their refinement and elegance. I was soon to discover that what had at first sight appeared to be visually beautiful abstract images mounted on aluminium were in fact far more intriguing.

Burford's practice covers a number of interlinked areas, with particular focuses on information aggregation and the crystallization of the transient domain. He is fascinated by film, more specifically the process of watching images on a screen and the way our eyes read different colour and light. He has designed and built a machine using an old record player and a camera to capture the light that emanates from a television screen. Each work he produces is a new interpretation of well know and accessible sources.

Whether he is capturing the light that is emitted from a classic film such as Gone with the Wind or Citizen Cane or that produced from a televised football match the effect is beautiful and at the same time extremely interesting. He is encouraging us to quite literally look at the world in a new light. The familiar becomes unknown; the every day is suddenly exciting and fresh. His painstaking method and refined practice combine to create works of art that are both visually stunning and intellectually interesting. 

‘Essentially I am interested in collecting and organising information, to materialize transient material into a mode where it can be contemplated much in the same way that one encounters a painting. My practice of Simultaneous Cinema is a way of generating temporal maps that notionally express a relation of time, memory and cinema. This practice came about through an instinctive desire to merge the transient nature of cinema (technic) with the traditions of painting, to return to the notion of discerning rather than experiencing. My work is centred about trying to take the time out of cinematic material.’

Sam Burford