Ambient Cunt (2026)
12 silver-gelatin photos ( 9”x 9”), custom photo wall 8’x8’, video projection runtime: (7:00 mins), rain curtain fountain 3’x5’x7’, caustic light sculpture, Archival inkjet print (60” x 107”)
Ambient Cunt chronicles the legacy and permutations of image-production as an atmospheric weather system. Across silver gelatin photography, enlarged film-scan composites, projected video through a rain curtain, and a caustic light sculpture, the installation traces how images accumulate cultural, material, and energetic residue as they morph between digital and analog media.
Central to the installation are 12 silver-gelatin prints arranged in a circular formation, presenting the 12-frames-per-second loop sequence, a classic in animation structure, and the minimum number of frames required for simulating continuous movement. Referencing Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, the sequence dissects movement into pulses of gesture and rhythm, with figurations of a Josephine Baker avatar appearing throughout the installation as an early pioneer of “going viral. “ Nearly 100 years ago, her banana skirt performances circulated internationally through film, photography, posters, gossip, and performance culture, transforming glamour, sexuality, humor, and spectacle into a trend-setting irresistible queer feminine force. As the first Black woman to star in a feature film, Baker reshaped the possibilities of cinematic and political imagination through a performance that was playful, erotic, and subversive. The installation extends this lineage through the recurring image of a gavel skirt, queering a symbol of legal authority by assigning sensuality and camp to it.
This body of work refers to cunt as a cultural and metaphysical frequency that recirculates across generations; a shape-shifting force of queer glamour, mesmerism, misogyny, taboo, mystery, humor, and life-giving energy that only gains its meaning by the politics and vernacular of the beholder. Like gravity or electromagnetism, cunt operates as an ambient field that cannot be seen directly but is felt through its effects on culture, power dynamics, atmosphere, and imagination.
The analog photographs resemble early spirit photography, but rather than capturing phantoms and ghosts, Burrell renders apparitions of cunt with Josephine Baker acting as the unit-cell of this spectral phenomena. Shot on a medium-format Hasselblad camera, these images were created by projecting digital video stills onto mist-shrouded water surfaces, allowing the images to billow, fracture, and blur before being re-recorded onto film. This digital-to-analog workflow cycles continuously throughout the installation. Enlarged scans of the photographs reappear within a circular video projection cast through a rain fountain, where the moving image collides with falling droplets of water that function as both a sonic texture and visual distortion effect. Across all the mediums, water serves as a conceptual framework for the underlying weather patterns attached to every image: evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Images move between emulsion and pixel, liquid and vapor, fidelity and residue.
A caustic light sculpture extends these atmospheric conditions above the installation, casting ethereal reflections onto the ceiling. Light drifts through the installation as a fluid material, scattering fragments of the moving image throughout the space and transforming the gallery into an active environment of raw, wild, uncaptured light. Ambient Cunt is an energy field soaking in attitude and aura- an atmospheric downpour cycling through queer time and space.
