Siren of the Tropics (2026)
“Siren of the tropics is a multimedia installation drawing on jazz composition, swamp biomes, and early cinema. Burrell treats the gallery as an ecosystem rather than a stage. A handmade sound system composed of reclaimed instrument cases- some shaped like venus flytraps and activated by projection. Water recordings gathered throughout the Bay Area swell, trickle, and recede, moving like a poem that skips and stutters across channels. Within these washes of sound and image, the tropics emerge as a resonant field shaped by improvisation and interdependence. The work takes its title from the silent film Siren of the Tropics (1927), in which Josephine Baker rose to international fame as the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, performing and strategically destabilizing colonial fantasies of the “native” woman. Channeling Baker’s legacy, Burrell dons a banana skirt made of gavels, objects of both judgment and percussion, suggesting that power is pliable and open to misuse. This installation inverts the tropical garden as a site of control, foregrounding dark ecologies of Black feminist subversion, spirit jazz, and queer metamorphosis.” Matthew Villar Miranda (Curator of Dream Jungle)
Commissioned by SFAC for Dream Jungle
