Artist Statement:

I had a conversation that wouldn’t leave me: Where are the artists, and how are we responding to this culturally and politically fraught moment? Communities are shattered, language is weaponized, and power is hardening into authority without consent.

My answer is A Brilliant Inheritance of Light—an Afrofuturist space to practice what we must protect. Thirdism is the visual language that holds it together.

I build it on canvas. Lines break and rejoin the way people do after trauma. Layered forms read as characters moved by an emotional current beneath the color. Tailored forms act as interface, garment, and protection, making trust, shelter, and accountability visible. Nodes become ports where knowledge connects and commitments turn into action. Beauty is civic technology. Thoughtful form—color, proportion, cadence— organize behavior, lower conflict, and invite participation, like a well-designed street or ballot. In A Brilliant Inheritance of Light, elegance is not decoration; it is the system.

Consider Statement, a spokesperson steps to the civic stage with head lifted because the words must outlast the moment. In Queen for a Day, leadership rotates and authority is worn briefly, in public, with grace. They live in a city designed like instruments, tuned for rhythm and community. Time is reorganized so progress keeps its roots. Ceremony—drum, dance, call and response— sets the operating system and trains our tools to be humane.

These paintings are blueprints and invitations. Feel the color, the rhythm, the forms sparking new pathways. This is a rehearsal space, a manual disguised as myth. Let it move you.

Bone, Smoke & Thunder is a journey through time, abstraction, and the undercurrent of Afrofuturism that pulses through Ainsley Burrows’ work.  The paintings act as portals—connecting viewers to both ancestral echoes and speculative futures.

The works embody three distinct energies: Bone, with skeletal structures that break abstraction down to its core; Smoke, with ethereal, shifting forms that dissolve into the unknown; and Thunder, with charged, visceral tension that demands presence. Though abstract, the paintings suggest sentient beings, offering familiar shapes—eyes, heads, silhouettes—as entry points into Burrows’ expansive world of abstraction. Bone, Smoke & Thunder is both an unveiling and a transformation, guiding the viewer through an immersive dialogue between what was, what is, and what could be.

This exhibition opened on April 4th, 2025

Artist Statement:

I am a multidisciplinary artist committed to unveiling untold stories and the often-unspoken dimensions of our emotional existence. In this exhibition, The Third Future: A Self-Portrait, I delve into these themes through a philosophical lens turned inward. We often envision the future as a singular, linear progression. But what if there was a second future? And what would a third future entail? I explored these questions by envisioning a third future—a realm of the unknown unknowns. 

The first future is where you know what you know.  For instance, I know my couchwill still be blue tomorrow. The second future is where you know what you don’t know, like the uncertain future of this country. The third future is where you don’t know what you don’t know—an unfathomable space without examples. It is from this enigmatic space that my paintings emerged, guided by intuitive movement. I approach each canvas without a plan, continuously engaging with it layer after layer in the space of unknowing, until my conscious mind intervenes. 

Through this series, as I sought to create portals into the third future, I realized that the resulting paintings were reflections of my inner existence, akin to how a figurative self-portrait mirrors the outer existence. Ultimately, these works reveal the fabric of my life and identity, inviting viewers to experience their own self-portraiture in a new light. By interpreting my abstract works as self-portraits, viewers can embark on an introspective journey that is more open-ended. Through this exploration, I aim to create a new language for self-portraiture that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

In 2022, Burrows built the Immigration series, paintings that reflect on the experiences and impact of immigrants in varied global settings. Burrows uses the brush to spin memories and interpretations into each multi-layered image. In works like The Long and Complicated History of America (2022) and Imprimatur (2022) Burrows interprets the beautiful, the perplex, and the delusional memories of a country formed by immigrants whose contributions are ubiquitous. Painting on an over-sized frame from a life-sized position helps him share his emotional state while capturing these stories. This sensation is found in the paints’ unceasing movement and in large swaths of emotive color: blues, blacks, and whites. His techniques, String Theory and  Neo-Chaos, are evident and through them, he works to imprint the turbulence of what he perceives onto the canvas.

Raktism is a new method for investigating the fourth dimension, developed by Ainsley Burrows.

​Burrows’ Raktist paintings are characterized by bright colors and soft shadows that often include abstract figures whose movements and features are choppy, creating the perception that we’re seeing them at different moments in time, from various perspectives. Sharp lines box in figures (be they spiritual or mortal) while parts of their bodies escape the framing devices; the escaped parts appear refracted and/or create a visual echo from the shape that was intersected. The lines cut the image and the space, splitting time and space simultaneously. Cubism, which also pursued the fourth dimension, splits the image itself to see the image in the round in a 2D medium; Raktism, however, taps the fourth dimension by splitting the image into different time signatures and revealing multiple planes.

This visual effect is intended to bring the image and space together while also paradoxically splitting it apart, so the viewer can feel the intensity of observing time, feeling the movement inherent in the image even though the painting is static. Burrows often  includes representations of traditional African spiritual figures that act as symbols of the unknown, unseen and unknowable, which potentially further elucidates his quest to understand the fourth dimension. There is richness in that which we don’t know, and perhaps even greater richness in its pursuit. 

Select paintings created in 2020 and 2021, during the height of the pandemic.

The Maroons: Rebellion, an uprising by the Jamaican Maroons against imperialist British enslavers in the 17th and 18th centuries, is the inspiration and title of  Burrows' most prolific series to date. Seeking freedom and autonomy, the Maroons spearheaded a successful rebellion that led to Jamaica’s eventual release from colonial rule. This series of 125 paintings includes expressive portraits of leaders from the movement; emotional, memory-laden, and community-focused renderings of the Middle Passage and subsequent enslavement; and symbolic explorations of cultural differences, ritual, and dissociation. With deep, passionate swathes and pops of color, Burrows explores the reverberations of a history that continues to affect him, showing how the past is alive and how we must make its legacy visible.