I'm a visual artist and graphic designer living in Seattle with my wife Audra, daughter Ripley, and our pup Peanut.
I work from happenstance arrangements that surprise me on city streets, forest trails, and neighborhood sidewalks. The work that follows from those encounters spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and site-specific installation, but drawing is at the center of all of it: a way of thinking through space rather than describing it.
I am interested in how a place is internalized – compressed, distorted, recombined – and how a drawing or painting might map that interior experience rather than the exterior facts. The resulting work tends toward the schematic: structures that suggest a geometry without resolving it, marks that propose a view without fixing it. A line can be a branch, a slope, a load-bearing member, or the edge of a shadow. I try to keep that ambiguity open.
In the paintings, taut drawn lines hold their ground against loose gestural fields of color – two systems occupying the same surface, neither fully in charge. In the sculptures, galvanized steel studs and wood stakes become three-dimensional drawings: open linear structures that propose an enclosure without completing one, grounded by fieldstones, held in tension with whatever surrounds them. In large-scale wall installations I have worked at the scale of rooms and city blocks, but the impulse is the same – to put a line in space and see what it does to the space.
The tension I keep returning to is between the organic and the constructed, the felt and the diagrammed. I am not trying to resolve that tension so much as find a form for it – something open-ended enough that a viewer can bring their own experience to it, and find something different there on the second look than they did on the first.
chris@chrisburnside.com
ig: @chrisburnside
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2026
CoCA, Mission Special, Art is Not Dead, curator, Seattle
Cannonball Arts, Virginia Park Pond, Seattle
CoCA, Mission Special, Art is Not Dead, curator, Seattle
Cannonball Arts, Virginia Park Pond, Seattle
2025
CoCA ShowWalls, CoCA Members’ Show, Seattle
Walk Don’t Run Art Marathon, Kira Burge, in collaboration with Steven Severin, Alice Gosti, Philippe Hyojung Kim, Meli Darby, Olivia Neal Howell + Jennie Kovalcik, curators, Seattle
2020
Tiger Strikes Asteroid, High Beams, Lacey Fekishazy, curator, Los Angeles
2015
NEPO 5k Don't Run, Klara Glosova, Sierra Stinson, Zack Bent and Serrah Russell, curators, Seattle
2014
NEPO 5k Don't Run, Klara Glosova, Sierra Stinson, Zack Bent and Serrah Russell, curators, Seattle
Spin’s Barbershop, Seattle
2013
NEPO 5k Don’t Run, Klara Glosova, Sierra Stinson and Zack Bent, curators, Seattle
Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Benefit Exhibition for BalletX, Philadelphia
Mighty Tieton, 10x10x10xTieton, Tieton
Wallingford Mural, NE 45th St & Burke Ave N, Seattle
2012
Storefronts Seattle, 1000 Thomas Street, South Lake Union, Seattle
2011
Small Black Door, Separation, Kris Graves Projects and Julian Calero, curators, Queens
2010
Outside the Time Zone, Tomorrow’s Dream, Chris Rawson and Julian Calero, curators, Brooklyn
Outside the Time Zone, 65 Roebling, Chris Rawson and Julian Calero, curators, Brooklyn
Camel Art Space, Lonely Fire, Chris Rawson and Julian Calero, curators, Brooklyn
Kymata Project Space, Chris Burnside, Garek Druss, Ben Needham, Adam Taye, Chris Rawson and Julian Calero, curators, Seattle
2009
Gross McCleaf Gallery, Solo Exhibition, Philadelphia
Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn, Brave Brooklyn: Art Exhibit and Auction, Brooklyn
Camel Art Space, Outside the Time Zone, Chris Rawson and Julian Calero, curators, Brooklyn
2008
National Academy Museum, 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary Art, New York
Gross McCleaf Gallery, Inquiry, Philadelphia
2007
Alpan Gallery, Installation Wall Drawing, Cut Pieces and Works on Paper, Huntington, NY
Tastes Like Chicken Art Space, One Pill Makes You Small, Brooklyn
2006
Washington Art Association, Installation and drawings, Washington, CT
Real Art Ways, Benefit Auction, Hartford, CT
Artists Space, Night of 1000 Drawings, New York
2005
Eugene, Yili Art Foundation 3rd Annual Exhibition, curated by Orlando Lima, New York
SOIL Gallery, Abstraction Obstruction: Working the Meridians, curated by Jeff Burgurt, Seattle
2004
Open Air, Installation, New York
2003
Kresge Gallery, The Object: Color as Carrier, curated by Seth Ely, Ramapo College, New Jersey
2002
Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art, Installation, Philadelphia
2001
Horton Gallery, MFA Thesis Exhibition, curated by Matt Freedman, Philadelphia
Fox Gallery, Two Person Exhibition, Philadelphia
2000
Meyerson Gallery, Graduate School of Fine Arts Award Winners’ Show, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Wayne Art Center, 2000 National Spring Open Juried Exhibition, Barbara Grossman, juror, Wayne, PA
Creative Arts Workshop, Vital Signs: Drawing as Inquiry, Robert Reed, juror, New Haven, CT
1996
Jacob Lawrence Gallery, BFA Thesis Exhibition, University of Washington, Seattle
EDUCATION
2001 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Master of Fine Arts
1996 University of Washington, Seattle, Bachelor of Fine Arts
AWARDS
2008
S.J. Wallace Truman Fund Prize, National Academy Museum, 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary Art, New York
2000
Stuart Egnal Scholarship, Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Juror’s Prize, 2000 National Spring Open Juried Exhibition, Barbara Grossman, juror, Wayne, PA
ARTICLES AND REVIEWS
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER REVIEW by Edith Newhall
NEW YORK SUN PROFILE by Orlando Lima
NEXUS REVIEW by R.B. Strauss
NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW by William Zimmer