It was with a frisson of anticipatory delight that I crossed the threshold of Tom Burr’s warehouse in Connecticut, two hours northeast of New York City. I was there to meet the artist for a tour of Torrington Project, his four-year studio-cum-exhibition space, ahead of its closure in late October 2024. The artist describes the project as a classic working studio meets living archive: stretching across grand through lines, he installed works from the ‘90s alongside works from the recent past, positioning them in proximity for the first time.
The studio occupied the second-floor factory warehouse, replete with weighted sliding doors, generous natural light, and the nineteenth-century factory’s bathrooms. Desks overflowed with collage materials where an assembly line might have been dismantled. The factory, for Burr, was a place to spend time with the work and to engage with the act of hosting.
Burr welcomed me with an affable warmth that softened the steely energy humming around his cerebral installation work, and our conversation continued to contrast our surroundings, like our words were the weft moving against the warp of the curvilinear ceiling trusses of the halls.
Tom Burr, A Few Golden Moments, 2011, installed at The Torrington Project, Torrington, CT, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York. Photo by Guang Xu.
It’s through a deep engagement in the social histories of space, through his writing as much as through his artworks, and through a particularly sophisticated use of the photographic image in the sculptural context, that Burr meets the lineages of Jean Genet and Robert Smithson, on whose threads he gently tugs. As a notable alumnus of the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, Burr is best known for a rigorous intertextuality in dialogue with his colleagues who came up in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, among them Mark Dion, Gregg Bordowitz, and Andrea Fraser.
Doors and passageways, which were fitted with care throughout the factory’s lofty space, framed the sculptures and collages that filled the hall. Burr walked me through them, and around familiar mirrored screenworks that stood to one side. I studied handsome, meticulously arranged fabric-and-photograph collages set against the floor that included a portrait of Genet as a boy laid adjacent to hunter-green fabric. Standing within the sophisticated yet staid squareness, and the play with disappearance, I recalled one of Peter Hujar’s black-and-white photographs of the West Side piers with a long unlit hallway as it deprives the viewer of the horizon, soon to slide into the Hudson.
One of the signatures of Burr’s work is a profound sensitivity to his surroundings. The artist grew up in Connecticut with family ties in the hilly deindustrialized region where we find ourselves, and so there is a biographical cast to the die. He has had a studio in Connecticut for years but maintains the identifier of New York artist.
I was intrigued to see what effect this singular site might have on works so responsive to local histories. Various iterations of Burr’s dark mirrored screens have filled galleries, ornate halls, and gardens before, the artist adapting dimensions and scales each time. Across one space in the factory, a folding screen featured alternating dark mirrored panes and opaque panels. A 2011 iteration of this work, entitled A Few Golden Moments, was aligned with painted guidelines from the Torrington factory’s former industrial days, in a way that was unexpectedly pleasurable to my senses, evoking high school basketball courts or ceremonial sigils drawn on wooden floors in ritual. The steel and aluminum screen casually electrified the otherwise humdrum worn and scuffed smooth surfaces of the works. This object performed remarkably similarly as it does in other climes: like an orgone beacon, a libidinal lighthouse.
Tom Burr, A Few Golden Moments, 2011, installed in the Hamptons, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York.
In an enormous wooden container sat the planted terrarium sculpture Circa ’77 (1995), for which Burr had recreated various species of park fauna. Like the folded-mirror motif, Burr’s cruising botany installations respond to a multitude of sites, including Sonsbeek International sculpture exhibition, where he created An American Garden in 1993, a park-like sculpture garden. His plant-potter works draw on the countercurrents of control and surveillance that undergird the practice of landscape architecture—and, recreated in the 21st century, these works are as prescient as ever given the ongoing militarization of the police and expanding video surveillance of public space.
Tom Burr, An American Garden, 1993. Courtesy the artist.
In the next hall, Burr had recreated Central Park’s legendary cruising grounds to the scale of a miniature model-train set. Strangely, in a curious play of size and coincidence, I had just passed through one of the very hillocks presented in the Ramble miniature earlier that week. We marveled over the photographs I took of an enormous palisade built for creating a blind to outsiders, privatizing one of the granite hillocks for outdoor sex in the heart of Manhattan.
Tom Burr, Circa ’77, 1995, Bortolami, New York, NY, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York. Photo by John Berens.
Our path wended around a series of pieces with rigid reflective panels of metal: they alternately revealed and hid photographs that Burr will exhibit in upcoming shows. We found ourselves in another former factory bathroom. “I always wanted to be an artist,” he said. “I wanted to be an artist so much; more than I wanted to make work. And I always wanted to be older. I knew I wanted to make material out of my life, and to look at it all one day.”
On the wall hung a piece entitled Edge of Seventeen, produced in 2021 for White Columns. The off-white letter-size laser print featured, right in the center, just a small, photo booth–like photograph of Burr as a teenager, front-facing but with eyes closed. I watched Burr looking at this image of himself on the restroom wall. The face of the artist as a teenager found in the factory’s sanctum sanctorum underscored, for me, the subtle resonance of this particular work. I wonder if the oblique gaze of sophisticated, urbane sexual sub-citizenship has given way to something more introspective in its self-portraiture.
I saw that bathroom, with its peeling walls, as the heart of the warehouse’s complicated warrens of paths. In this work, the claim the artist stakes with the Torrington Project as a return home is cemented. It’s a claim he makes from that ur-place of gay autobiographical staging and masc mise en abime. I watched a father look at his son, and the son cast his gaze to the ground. I remembered how I secretly applied ointment to heal my first tattoos and flexed for the mirror, imagining the men who would love me one day. In that restroom, I saw Icarus looking back at his father, Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth of Knossos. I saw the artist as he looks back at himself.
As we moved to the factory manager’s office with windows that look out onto the factory foreman’s office, Burr’s retrospection gave way to my own introspection. We spoke about a documentary-film project I’m directing, for which I’m diving into the murky world of Victorian psychiatric (woo-woo) miasma theory, and the eugenic social-cleansing discourse behind the modern park movement, through the writing of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. On the table, among a small array of Burr’s books, I alighted on the exact encyclopedic text that I’ve been poring through all season.
Touched by the happy accident of this book, and maybe despite myself, I explained the investigation that initially brought me to this mountainous region and to request this visit at the last minute. I told him that my family had recently learned that some of our ancestors fled this very valley after the execution of their mother, Alice (Alse) Beaman Young, for allegations of witchcraft in the British North American colonies in 1647. Her trial was a harbinger of the wave of seventeenth-century violence that would reach its zenith a few years later in Salem. That morbid inquiry put me within minutes of his studio. It was only in reading a map that I’d recognized the small postindustrial city that lent its name to the artist’s studio project.
Carl Jung, in his book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1952), engaged in a letter-writing practice that would span twenty-six years with Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who received a Nobel for his research in quantum physics. A unique problem plagued Pauli’s lab work: laboratory equipment malfunctioned in his presence, as if his very aura disrupted the delicate workings of his experimental tools. Pauli sought advice from Jung, and the unlikely pair began to discuss archetypes and atoms, the collective unconscious, and their personal lives. It was through Jung’s curiosity with this unhappy synchrony that he began working toward one of his opuses on collective consciousness.
On the occasion of the vernal equinox, Pauli sent Jung a letter thanking the elder psychoanalyst and magician for the personalized letter of encouragement, writing:
I should like to thank you most heartily for your detailed letter. It was most encouraging for me, in my own interpretation of the manifestations of my unconscious, to see that basically I am on the right track. At the moment, physics is preoccupied with mirror images, which used to be the case with my dreams, and actually parallel with mathematical work that has now become topical.
The idea that a field in its connected entirety can be working on a phenomenon as singular as the mirror image is a delight. Jung would go on to propose that the phenomenon of déjà vu and synchronicity were quantum traces of this greater connectivity.
Tom Burr, A Few Golden Moments, 2011, installed in the Hamptons, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York.
I think the value of the Torrington Project may lie in more ephemeral, rather than formal, qualities of the project itself—and in the deeply collective lineages the artist invokes.
Burr and I sipped our glasses of mineral water. He explained: “At a certain point, I found out I wasn’t going to die of AIDS. You’ll also understand this yourself, I think. Eventually, I realized I was going to become an older person, and so suddenly I was able to revisit this impulse, and to look at all the pathways the work took, which is exceedingly gratifying.”
Encounters like this point to the power that lineage holds in my psyche, in light of this profound interruption that AIDS represents. With the Torrington Project, what the artist has conjured up are a series of conditions where the observer encounters their own self. And in my case, he has hastened a fruitful confrontation with my lineage, in this case one that is both creative and biological.
As the sun set, I texted Burr a thank-you message and included a picture from the graveyard a few minutes down the road from him, telling him that I found the graves of the town officials who found my ancestor guilty of witchcraft. In 1647, after receiving her sentence, Alice Young was executed in the colonies, as a contagious disease afflicted her town. She was the first woman victim of witch trials in what is now the United States.
In 2017, she was formally exonerated of all charges of witchcraft by the council of her northern Connecticut town.
