SWEET POISON
In Sweet Poison, Cristina Burns constructs a hyper-stylized universe where seduction and suffering coexist beneath a glossy surface of sugar-coated desire. The series presents anthropomorphic figures—often female—transformed by processed food aesthetics into uncanny icons of submission, ecstasy, and emotional collapse. Each character is both altar and offering, swathed in confections that blur the boundary between nourishment and narcotic, devotion and dependence.
At once surreal and disturbingly intimate, the works evoke the language of advertising, childhood nostalgia, and sacred ritual. Cake becomes a crown. Ice cream a wound. Frosting a veil for longing. Burns’s figures are rendered powerless not through violence, but through worship—of sweetness, of beauty, of someone or something they cannot resist.
Sweet Poison is not simply a commentary on consumer culture or addiction. It is a poetic autopsy of how we give ourselves away: to the wrong person, to a toxic ideal, to the insatiable hunger for perfection. Seduction here is spiritual and chemical. The result is a series that is as arresting as it is unsettling, balancing on the knife’s edge between visual delight and emotional decay.
HOLY SUGAR, 2015
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Limited edition print – dimensions available upon request
Limited edition print – dimensions available upon request
“Devotion tastes sweet until it consumes you.”
Holy Sugar” explores the ecstatic surrender to sweetness — whether it’s a person, a pleasure, or a chemical high. The figure becomes both shrine and offering in a world where seduction is saccharine and escape is impossible.
TIC TOC - COTTON CANDY DELIRIUM , 2015
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Limited edition print – dimensions available upon request
Limited edition print – dimensions available upon request
“A candy-colored trance of obedience and dissociation, wrapped in whipped nostalgia."
TRUE LOVE, 2015
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Limited edition print – dimensions available upon request
Limited edition print – dimensions available upon request
“In a pink bubble of romantic idealism, she offers everything — heart exposed, body unguarded. But love, like sugar, melts. And sometimes, it scars.”
