David Allen Burns is a life-long Californian and native of Los Angeles. He earned an MFA in Studio Art from UCIrvine and a BFA from California Institute of the Arts. David is a co-founder of Fallen Fruit, a contemporary art collective that uses fruit as a material for creating art projects that investigate the boundaries of public spaces, including urban geographies, historical archives and time-based media. Prior to his work with Fallen Fruit, David was core faculty in two programs at CalArts from 1994 to 2008. David's curatorial practice investigates narrative structures in contemporary art with notable exhibitions for the journal Leonardo at MIT; the Armory Center for the Arts and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Concurrent to the development of his career in contemporary art and academics, David has also built expertise in corporate branding strategy, advertising and television as a technical consultant for projects with Mercedes Benz, Discovery Channel, SEGA Gameworks and others. Burns’ immersive art projects have been exhibited at Manifesta Biennale, Italy, Melbourne Triennial, Australia, Ars Electronica, Austria, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Netherlands Architecture Institute at Maastricht, The Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Armory Center for the Arts, Machine Project, and Artists Space in New York amongst others. Notable timebased artworks have shown in festivals and exhibitions including; The Getty Center, Los Angeles, The Tate Modern/Tank.tv, London, The Armenian Museum of Experimental Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, and in festivals including; InsideOUT, OutFest, MIX, NEWFEST, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and others. Reviews and publishing may be seen in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Forum, Artillery, X-tra, Cabinet, Paper, Rhizome, The L.A. Weekly, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and more. Awards include: National Endowment for the Humanities, Creative Capital, Metlife Grant, Art Matters, Goodworks, YouTube Featured Video, LA Weekly’s Best of L.A., Rhizome.org new media award, Yahoo! Best of the Web, Berkeley Film Festival, Best Experimental and Sydney Underground Film Festival, and more. David's work activates the nuances of social spaces, public archives and cultural indexes as an authentic negotiation by creating works of art that are expressions of people and place and reframe the real-world and real-time.

Much of my work as an artist is created collaboratively – whether that be in collaboration with the public participation, civic process, or other artists and fabricators. The history of artworks that I have created primarily exist within the public realm. Commissioned permanent artworks that are site-specific for museum spaces, public parks, biennials, as well as private collections. My art career began in Los Angeles with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property. This early work uses cartography and geography as an indexical tool to create serialized and site-specific works of art that often embraces public participation. The body of work includes photographic portraits, experimental documentary videos, public art installations, and exhibition projects. Using fruit (and public spaces and public archives) as a method of interrogating the familiar, the art works investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood, and new forms of citizenship. From protests to proposals for new urban green space, this work aims to reconfigure the relationship of sharing and explore understandings of public and private. I have learned that fruit can be many things; it’s a subject and object at the same time it is aesthetic. Fruit often triggers a childhood memory; it’s emotional and familiar. Everyone is an expert on the flavor of a banana. Much of this work is linked to ideas of place and family, and much of these works echo a sense of connectedness with something very primal – our capacity to share the world with others. I believe that contemporary art is a common denominator to change the way we all experience the world.