Audrey Barcio
no subject (non-attachment)
The algorithm can't deal with Bashō.
2021
Echo Arts proudly presents no subject (non-attachment), a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chicago-based visual artist Audrey Barcio, 2019 Pollock-Krasner grantee and 2021 Joan Mitchell Fellowship nominee. “No subject has something to do with filling in the gaps of our communication,” she says. “When you quickly send an email and you don't put a subject line, the algorithm populates 'no subject' as subject. It's like a voice from beyond transmitting something to you, but the something it's transmitting is nothing — which kind of makes me smile, because it's similar to what some people say about abstract art.” The second part of the title was inspired by a 17th-century haiku by Matsuo Bashō: Skylark on moor — sweet song of non-attachment.
Pyramids are among the defining visual elements of the work — they might come from a favorite Agnes Martin painting, from researching Egyptian tombs, or from the Luxor casino Barcio lived beside in Las Vegas, shooting its spotlight all the way into space. Alongside Martin, Barcio lists Anni Albers, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hilma af Klint among the women artists who inform her visual language. But foremost is her grandmother — her first art teacher, who moved from figuration to abstraction as she lost her eyesight.
Sewing is literally stitching together my personal history with art history.As a material homage to that heritage, Barcio sewed these surfaces together from raw canvas and strips of grey-and-white checkerboard fabric — alluding at once to abstract art history and to the checkered background digital designers recognize as emptiness waiting to be filled. “Even in pain we're meant to see the flowers,” Barcio says, citing Bashō once more. “We have the choice of what to carry with us. Maybe we carry forth the beauty.”
Stitching the fake and the real, the ancient and the new.
Audrey Barcio is a Chicago-based painter whose stitched-canvas abstractions carry a lineage of women artists — Agnes Martin, Anni Albers, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hilma af Klint — and, above all, her grandmother, her first art teacher, who painted in a corner beside the potbelly stove and sewed for the household. After a car accident in her twenties cost Barcio several fingers on her dominant hand, the relationship between the fake and the real became central to her work.
Barcio received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2019 and was a 2021 Joan Mitchell Fellowship nominee. Her work has been covered by Artforum, OCCHI Magazine, NUVO, and the Las Vegas Weekly.