Barbara Monaco
Untitled (place your own broken heart puns here), 2009. Acrylic on mirror, glued to poster board and plastic frame (12"x15")
The concept was Fracture (the act of breaking, or state of being broken)
Process: I tore the mirror out of the frame, painted a human heart on it, smashed it with a hammer, and glued the pieces to the frame backing and reattached the plastic painted frame.
Ishita Dharnidharka
ReplyDeleteBarbara’s use of process, material, and form effectively embody the concept of Fracture. The artwork has good unity and is well balanced with small shards of the mirror being juxtaposed with bigger pieces, all of which are contained within the surrounding frame. The acrylic heart itself is a good representation of a real one in terms of warm, red colors with a tinge of blue. The colors used for the heart nicely interact with the same colors that are used to paint the inside of the frame, which makes the viewer’s gaze travel around the piece and return to the broken heart. It also further unifies and balances the artwork, and leads to the tension between the closed composition offered by the frame and the open composition suggested by the jagged and missing pieces of the mirror. The form is made more abstract by its size because it is larger than that of the human heart. One reason for this could be for the intention of the viewer’s focus to be primarily on the form, or maybe to size the heart large enough as compared to the mirror being used. Line quality could also have been further explored to depict the contrast between the thickness of the arteries and veins. This work of art explores the concept of a broken heart, which is eventually “mended” with time, but is never quite the same again. Each new heartbreak heals the heart back together differently, with some parts of it always being left behind. This is portrayed in the artwork by rearranging the pieces of the mirror back together, but not quite perfectly, and with some pieces missing. This artwork is also displayed using a mirror and at a certain height because from a particular position the artwork is reflected to lie over the heart of the viewer. This invites the audience to personally interact with the piece and reflect on his/her own experiences with heartbreak.