In her work, which scans a variety of mediums, including embroidery, found objects, and painting, Bay Area artist Lauren DiCioccio investigates the physical/tangible beauty of mass-produced media. As traditional media, especially newspapers and magazines, but even writing pads and office papers become obsolete, she wonders, “What will happen when we no longer touch information?”
In her Color Codification Dot Drawings, DiCioccio creates artwork out of printed magazine pages, employing a sort of color-driven Morse Code method. The result is a media-induced pointillism.
Here’s how it works:
• She lays a sheet of frosted mylar over a magazine page.
• She assigns a color to every letter (numbers are shades of grayscale), and applies tiny dots of paint over every character on the page according to the color-code.
She says, “Making the paintings is a lot like solving a cryptogram and the result is a legible blur of dots in the form of the article’s layout, a kind of Braille for the color-inclined.”