Currently the ACMI in Melbourne is holding the first comprehensive retrospective of Tim Burton ever to be exhibited in Australia. The Retrospective is direct from New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and chronologically documents an extensive body of work that features over 700 drawings, paintings and cinematic memorabilia created by Burton and his beautifully disturbing imagination.
Burton takes the audience into a world where distortion is the key to solving all of life’s riddles- where life as we know it is dehumanized; stretched, skewed and morphed into a sinister universe in which characters and creatures are only limited to ones imagination.
Burton’s led drawing series titled ‘Beautifying Burbank’ was one of main highlights for me within the exhibition, as he reconceptualises suburban life through exaggerated scenarios of elongated and distorted figures performing idiosyncratic behaviour and satirizing his humorous captions. Burton’s eerie tales of Burbank really question the notion of “happily ever after” where fairytales have now past their expiry as suburbia never looked so sadistic.
Burton explores the relationship between childhood and adulthood, where our imagination often becomes clouded as the expectation of reason and logic prevail with time. In all of his work we see the struggle in growing up and even a resistance to the inevitability, as Burton represents a unique and disturbing position as an adult who never forgot his childhood imagination.
Burton’s playful yet eerie collection shows how ones imagination is not always lost through age, and makes us question- are we all just big kids trapped in adults bodies, overpopulating Burbank?
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