Sleeping Between the Sun and the Moon
"This cat’s cradle that Burack weaves between the cosmic, the natural envi- ronment, and the intimately domestic made intuitive sense to me once I saw several of her pieces together. Her Asteroid, a sphere of dried snake- weed hanging from the ceiling, re- minds me of the lantern in the shape of a star that hangs in my partner’s daughter’s room. Many of the earliest stories we tell our children, perhaps the earliest stories of human culture, revolve around the stars: the story of Orion the hunter, of lost travelers guiding themselves home by the stars. I think of Burack putting her two children to bed at their home in the Ortiz Mountains, where the stars are doubtless much brighter than in comparatively urban Albuquerque. Reading Alicia Inez Guzmán’s essay accompanying the exhibition on visiting with Burack in her home, I learn that Asteroid originally hung in her daughter’s room. It seems like a parenting instinct, to tuck your children in at night and tell them: even the vast and unknowable stars are watching over you. Or, as Burack’s work suggests, even the coyotes and the snakeweed and the hot desert air are your home. What a comforting world to fall asleep in." - excerpt from Southwest Contemporary review by Robin Babb