Lockdown, monsters and fantasies

Mildred Burton’s practice often involved projecting her imagination onto everyday spaces and objects. Burton’s images recreate her childhood in Paraná, a lush, tropical town in the centre of Argentina, and the domestic environments in which she grew up, injecting fantastical life into furniture, family portraits and different corners of her home. In the artwork Invasión II (Invasion II, 1980) a dragon bursts from an unknown world into a living room that seems to belong solely to us, or at least we are the only witnesses to the occurrence. These unexpected invasions or apparitions allowed Burton to upend ‘ordinary’ logic so as to turn it into the bridge one needs to cross into ‘the unknown’.

In each of these artworks, Burton represents her quest to escape what could often be an oppressive domestic world and transform it into something fantastical and dreamlike. Her output from the 70s and 80s also contains echoes of the repressive regime established by the military dictatorship at the time. Burton drew from the fantasy literature she read and her own imagination to create monsters in forcibly enclosed spaces that evoked the political situation.

As Burton does with her paintings and drawings, we might see this quarantine lock-down as an opportunity to expel and confront the monsters inside of us, addressing them with both emotional distance and a sense of humour. Mildred’s fantastical images inspire us to reimagine the ways in which we live our domestic life, especially now that we find ourselves obliged to stay at home: How much imagination does it take to give shape to monsters we have to deal with during our confinement? How can we transform our homes by bringing the outside in? The objects we’ve been living with for weeks on end now: how might they come to life?

Marcos Kramer, Curator