Jeffrey Paul Burger: Meta-Art

Few artists create works of art that themselves create art—“Meta-Art” as coined by artist/producer Jeffrey Paul Burger. Burger’s ever-changing Meta-Art installations randomly transform a vast pool of his photography from around the world into an endless stream of unique multi-layered abstract and surreal montages displayed on large flat-panel screens or projections—all created in real time. Just as each image has never been seen before, it is also discarded immediately after being replaced on the display by its successor, never to be seen again. And these Meta-Art installations keep creating and displaying this stunning river of exclusive art endlessly, with new images birthing at site-appropriate rates ranging from seconds to minutes.

The imagery created by the Meta-Art project is intrinsically organic due to the exclusive use of Burger’s photography as source material. The library of 10,000-plus photos he has taken over the past dozen years of travel is comprised primarily of images that are themselves abstract in nature—everything from close-ups of flowers, fabric, rust and raku to the mechanics of architecture and classic cars to motion-blurred light paintings of colorfully clad dancers and city lights. Not by accident, their very nature lends itself exceptionally well to artistic results when randomly composited by a Meta-Art installation. Sometimes the original photographic elements are recognizable in these exotic collages, often times not.

Each Meta-Art installation is unique due to Burger's immense existing photo library, ongoing photographic adventures and ever-evolving programming. Meta-Art installations are primarily intended for projection at considerable size in public spaces such as museums, airports, restaurants, bars, corporate lobbies and malls—even floors, ceilings and the sides of large buildings. The artist particularly welcomes custom commissions that celebrate a given city/region/country, business or family event. Meta-Art installations are also unique statements for the homes of high-end art collectors, either using existing large screen displays in home theaters or ensconced in unusual hand-crafted artistic housings such as custom-framed plasma displays.

The ever-changing, random, organic nature of Burger's Meta-Art typically has profound effects on viewers—even those whom the project stimulates to ask the most profound question in the art world: “What is art?” Beyond the overt artistic impact, each image serves as a sort of Technicolor Rorshach test that compels the witness to stretch the imagination in a world that is simultaneously familiar and fantastic, soothing and energizing. The Meta-Art experience also delivers a decidedly existential quality, immersing viewers with ineffable fascination in a never-ending cycle of birth, life and death of beautiful art that exists only in the moment.

One is drawn inexorably into a mesmerizing spell of Jeffrey Paul Burger's Meta-Art project, making these unique installations hard to turn away from and compelling to return to regularly.