In any case, her embrace of the new has had a salutary effect - in one of those curious twists, Burko's paintings have become increasingly expressionistic and painterly as she has been simultaneously articulating her eye through the clarifying lens of photography.
Her latest photographs, on the ground floor of Locks Gallery, take on some of the subjects she has painted - the lakes, glaciers, and mountains of Montana and Wyoming - but Burko's aerial perspective (she's looking down more than forward, as she does in her paintings) and the cropping of her images make it difficult for viewers to gauge distances, much less determine what their physical relationship might be to the landscape in question. Other than the series' title, the pictures making up "Over Montana Glacier National Park" offer no clues as to where Burko might have been to shoot these discombobulating aerial images. (From a helicopter with its door removed, it turns out.)
There are also parallels between Burko's photographic images and other forms of contemporary art and photography that I have never seen in her paintings. For instance, photographs from her "Mid Flight" series, which seem to offer a more straight-ahead perspective than the rest, faintly resemble the female silhouettes and body prints made by Ana Mendieta in sand, mud, and grass, as well as Mendieta's photographs documenting them. Burko's close-up photographs, taken in Bucks County, of the surface of water (which are something of an anomaly in this show, but representative of Burko's more intimate photographs of her everyday surroundings), are slightly reminiscent of the paintings of the British artist Kate Bright, who exhibits with Locks.
