Sylvia Grace Borda - A Fine Artist
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Thirty-six Minestrone  
  Artist Statement  

In my most recent digital work, I address the ideologies of two modern art movements, Pop and Hard Edge or Minimal painting, in their most reduced forms I am interested in these two areas given the wealth of information available about these art movements, and the on-going legacies left by artists from this period.

Pop art took everyday forms and reverted these to unanticipated form for public delivery. I decided to take Pop and make it the form. In using Warhol’s soup can paintings/silkscreen as my base, I could cite a well critically acclaimed series of artworks and site them in relation to their most basic indexical form available today, the barcode. The barcode represents the smallest indexical unit available in today’s culture that maintains the identity of a product. In reproducing some of Warhol’s pictures in this reduced form, an irony is formed between culture and perception. Warhol’s pieces were recognizable by their form, shape and direct reference to Campbell soup can labels, by using barcodes to reference the soups, the relationship between the viewer and the object becomes distant and estranged. The reception of the barcode as an artform parallels Pop’s earliest reception – it is seen as cold and mechanical. The work, though produced by an automated mechanism, the computer, must be hand plotted. The barcode becomes a metaphor for societal differences in perceiving computer generated art. The codes displayed in large scale are easily recognizable in terms of their purpose; however, the overlapping codes lose indexical use and become an abstract field of lines reminiscent of the Hard Edge compositions of late modernist painters like Newman and Noland.

** The series started in 2000 and consists of over 30 large screened digital prints. Sizes range between 4 feet by 3 feet to 7 feet by 3 feet.