Art Opening
Claudia Borgna
Fri, Jul 17, 6–8pm
Zoho Gallery
Fábrica la Aurora 1C
155-9432

The evolution of landscape By Claudia Borgna

International artist Claudia Borgna brings her modern and thought-provoking work to San Miguel this month. Her installations incorporate a material so common in our modern world, one might never imagine that it holds an intrinsic beauty. She somehow transforms trash (or is it?) into treasure with her innovative creations.

Borgna was born in Hamburg, Germany, and raised in Italy. After graduating from Genoa University in foreign literature, she moved to London, where she has been living for the past 15 years. 

For several years she has attended diverse art courses, both practical and theoretical, which have allowed her to experiment with various disciplines, media and techniques, including ceramics, life drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking. 

This led to her completion in 2005 of a second degree in fine art at the London Metropolitan University. Since then she has been exhibiting in shows in London, around the UK, Europe and the US, and has attended residencies in the US, Canada and Europe.

She has been awarded the Joan Mitchell and the Pollock-Krasner grants.

Her work entails the investigation of what she calls the “evolution of landscape,” a process started and effected by modern lifestyles and consumerism. Her installations are the materialization of an ongoing observation and questioning of how the “plastic” and the natural realms interact with one another and thereby come to create new ephemeral orders.

She describes her vision in the following mission statement, found on her website: 

Traveling around, I have come to realize we are living in a world overflowing

with waste. This starting point led me to investigate the relationship between discarded materials, such as plastic bags, and the environment.

In past years, I have been looking at how rubbish and man-made objects are transforming and creating new landscapes and becoming more integrated into nature.

This process, which I call “the evolution of landscape,” is generated by our modern lifestyle, i.e. consumption. I find it interesting to observe, because from an artistic point of view, this is a very exciting material to work with and exploit.

After working for years with all sorts of discarded materials, waste and rubbish, I decided that for the time being I would focus on working with plastic bags. Plastic bags epitomize perfect and quintessential discarded objects. The plastic bag is the symbolic embryo that contains our lifestyle and is the vessel that carries it out in its journey.

I find plastic bags interesting because of their remarkable contradictory qualities. Plastic bags are in fact both worthless and useful, disposable and recyclable, flimsy and strong, ephemeral and eternal. Above all, they are universal.

By putting the plastic bag in an artistic context, I would like to elevate it to another dimension that takes it away from the idea of the banal and obvious and, for an instant, transforms it into a poetic object. It becomes an inspiring mass-produced muse, with forms, lines and color, that interact with the surrounding environment.

Like my performances, the plastic bags are a human and therefore natural appendix of man. Because one could argue that whatever is man-made is natural, then ultimately nature is an unstable and unreliable human construction ruled by social and cultural needs.

I have chosen to materialize my ideas through the form of installation, because in this way I find I can better express the concept of environment, space, time and duration. I like my installation to be large and give a sense of multitude and mass, as in mass-production, to be invasive by taking over space to the point of suffocation, and to be in constant evolution and therefore changeable.

I want my work to become a virtual lyrical extension of modern life that substitutes the old idealized concept of nature with a romanticized modern one.

My works want to underline the relationship, or the conflict, between culture and nature, and how they both influence and reflect each other, but I also want to build an awareness and comment on the way we are living and how it effects the environment.

The comment is non-judgmental, since I haven’t resolved for myself, and never will, its contradictory nature of beauty and danger.

Visit http://www.claudiaborgna.keepfree.de/cb/Claudia_Borgna.html  to see images of Claudia Borgna’s work. You also have the chance to see her impressive work in person at Zoho Gallery inside Fábrica La Aurora on Friday evening, July 17.