Jill Sylvia
Monday, 12 April 2010
Work from Balance Sheets and Reconstructions.
“Ledger sheets are traditionally used to record the financial transactions of a business or an individual. These papers host the data necessary for accounting information to be compiled, and for analysis in determining profit and loss. They are the material of economics.
In an attempt to understand our need to quantify our transactions, I employ this paper. I use a drafting knife to individually remove tens of thousands of boxes from this paper, leaving behind the lattice of the grid intended to separate the boxes. I involve myself in this routine of trying to make time and labor palpable while communicating its loss. I am concerned with the manner in which this material is recontextualized by way of process, (and consequent futility), and how the resulting voids suggest “that the methods we employ to arrange our world provide more insight into ourselves than that which we seek to organize.”
The skeletal pages drape and accumulate, demarcate the time cost for their creation, and become the buildings for which they have laid the groundwork. Grids are reconstructed using the excised boxes in order to create a new sense, a new value. The boxes become the units of the picture plane, the medium of color fields.
With each piece, the notion of “value” is called into question – be it the value of our quotidian pursuits, the relative value of labor, or the implicit values of economic advancement.” – Jill Sylvia