Marissa Burns
Portfolio
The Complicated History of Women's Rights in America
2020
My work for Under the Same Flag represents activist women in the past and present. These women winning the right to vote paved the way for other women lead revolutions, the suffragette movement was the first act of an enabling entity of women’s right to and ownership of their own bodies, life choices and independence.
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My work depicts different eras of women’s activism in the United States. Ranging the past 100 years, I show women fighting and continuing to take action for their rights. The last public words leading suffragist Inez Miholland spoke before her untimely death were, “Mr. President, how long must we wait for liberty?!” These words ring true today. Sexism, misogyny, and violence against women are still real issues in 2020. Although women have many more opportunities than they did in 1920, we still have a long way to go.
A Bunch of Pricks
2018
A Bunch of Pricks examines the contemporary climate in which women live. My series of multilayered watercolors depict the struggle and experience of life as a woman in a world dominated by cis men. The accusations, assumptions, and authority of cis men permeate our daily activities—working in an office, walking home, bringing groceries out to a parking lot, and even being in our own homes—causing anxiety, fear, humiliation, and disgrace.
A Bunch of Pricks examines the experience of being surrounded and even swallowed by those feelings. The cacti in my work represent the protruding, unapologetic, and aggressive nature of the cis male patriarchal hegemony that consumes America.
Chasing Euphoria
2017
These paintings exemplify feelings of hope, determination, and perseverance. They are meditations on secret thoughts, emotions, and inspirations.
They are radiations of positive thinking and explosions of reflection.
Millennial Mouth
2016
My work is meant to represent The Millennial Generations hardships, attitudes, and progress in this twenty first century era.
In a fast paced world full of supposed opportunity and wonder there is a giant problem. The Millennial's are all grown up.
Hooks and Flowers
2013
I wanted to create a series in which the viewer can recognize the images as both strikingly beautiful, but also has an acute sense of danger.
Nature Photography
Photographs of the nature that surrounds me.