Louisa Bufardeci
It only takes a few needles and spins to turn the world upside down in the work of this minimalist-inspired Australian artist
By Sheba White
Published: April 21st, 2007 | 8:49am
If you've ever walked around a neighborhood and questioned why places that plot your everyday course aren't anywhere on a map, or browsed federal reports and wondered where they come up with their statistics, or even considered what a map would look like if borders were drawn by people on the bottom of the economic totem pole, then you're asking the same questions that Louisa Bufardeci asks.
Using government documents as her basis, the minimalist-inspired Australian artist researches a given set of data, and then reworks them with digital imaging, installation-sized sculpture, and, more recently, needlework.
At the core of much of her previous work is a repulsion to and reworking of the idea of statistics and everything they stand for — a process that Bufardeci described in her artist's statement as a desire to "recode them and re-present them in ways that question their original form of representation and their assumptions" and that tears their "artificial constructions" apart.
"I can give you a little anecdote, if you like," a surprisingly wispy-sweet Bufardeci answered from her New York rental in early April 2007 when responding to the question of the root of this repulsion, "It started in Australia when I was called upon to do this statistical survey, which is a bit like being called up for jury duty in the United States. You get a phone call once a month, for about four months, and you have to answer a set of questions."
"For me, the questions were about employment. It was all things that I could answer. But, I was having a difficult time at that point in my life. I was studying, and working part-time, and I was doing volunteer work, and working on my art. So, all of the questions that this person was asking me were more for people with regular lifestyles. They were kind of in-the-box type questions. I didn't fit, yet I had to pick a box."
"It was really disconcerting to know that this kind of information would be informing government policy. I was wondering what damage I was doing, giving into questions that weren't really true, because my lifestyle wouldn't fit into any of the boxes. It started me thinking about how statistics are gathered, and how they're supposed to represent people, first, and then information systems generally."
A Walk Around the Periphery of the Constituency of Malviya Nagar, her 2004 reworking of a standard map takes the idea of place and order and re-maps a 40-kilometer section of Delhi, India, according to Bufardeci's pointedly arbitrary and subjective interests — including neighborhood trees, vendors, and smells that would otherwise never appear on more tourist-centered routes. The candy-colored map with its accompanying key is startling, almost as if the artist were as equally attracted to the statistical results.
"That impression of everything being ordered and perfect and having a place," Bufardeci explained of her simultaneous attraction to these documents, "the fact that there is this order and system that makes everything OK or is satisfying in a really visual and visceral way — I was drawing on that history to challenge what I was experiencing as well."
Recently, Bufardeci has been working on a series in needlepoint — a skill she picked up from her mother's love of the Italian needlework form of Bargello — to transcribe digital frequencies of wire-tapped conversations, anti-war speeches, and gun shots. The paranoia-inspiring, tightly wool-threaded landscapes seem like a departure from statistical analysis for the artist, but are steeped in a mathematically-based source, as well.
"The grid that I stitch on is a system, and the very first thing that drew me to it was the shape of the soundwave and the shape of the Bargello needlepoint. Its form has the look of regular waves that's repeated eternally. It's just stuck in me as a possibility for things that go up and down."
When asked if she will go back to working from the CIA's The World Factbook, among other sources that have formed the backbone of her previous work, Bufardeci replied, "Well I'm not really working with sets of statistics at all now, but I do get very excited when I see them. And so do other people. My mother-in-law is constantly sending me sets of statistics that she thinks I should make into art," Bufardeci laughed, "It's the sort of thing I could do for the rest of my life quite happily, but I felt that I had to move on."
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more