Flat Paintings Inspired by Unifying Elements of a Common World by Audrey Barcio

Sarah Mills

Bio

Audrey Barcio is an artist and Assistant Professor at Ball State University. Her work negates the heritage of abstraction intersecting with the tools of the virtual industrial age. Through the use of universal symbology that is rooted in the language of the early abstractionists, her work strives to transcend the accepted cultural raison d'être.

Barcio received her BAE from Herron School of Art and Design and her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She attended the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art in Brittany, France, and completed a Vermont Studio Center residency in 2017 and is a 2019 Pollock - Krasner Foundation Grant recipient.

Her work has been published in New American Paintings and has been featured in multiple group exhibitions around the U.S., including Art in America at the Art Miami Satellite Fair, ART IN CONTEXT: Selections from the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection, Las Vegas, NV, and GLAMFA at UC Long Beach. Recent solo exhibitions include Syracuse University, New York, the Las Vegas Government Center, Las Vegas, NV, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Tube Factory, Indianapolis, IN. Barcio's work is included in several public and private collections, including that of the Barrick Museum of Art

Statement

Through my paintings I negate the heritage of abstraction and where it intersects with the tools of the Virtual Industrial Age. My research involves the linage of abstraction while looking at how the flatness of digital images has impacted our visual literacy. The starting point for this body of work is the iconic gray and white checkerboard pattern recognized by contemporary digital designers as a symbol for emptiness waiting to be filled. Transforming that virtual nothingness into concrete form, I employ it to empower interpretations of the iconographic legacy of our Modernist forbears.

This vision of universal symbology is as futuristic as it is rooted in the constructed languages of the early abstractionists. I strive for the work to transcend the accepted cultural raison d'être of this century —the cult of self—to evoke instead the universal; to speak to the ancestral, universal, and essential; to start conversations arising not from coteries but from the unifying elements of a common world: shape, color, line, form, material, surface, and the infinite potentialities that arise from relationships.