Lauren Dicioccio & Mass Produced Beauty

Recent­ly, I dis­cov­ered the work of Lau­ren Dicioc­cio via sfgirl­by­bay. Specif­i­cal­ly, I saw that she had embroi­dered mon­ey and mar­veled at the painstak­ing details. Upon vis­it­ing her web­site, I dis­cov­ered that she’s done a lot more work like it — old slides, mag­a­zines, and more.  She explains in her artist statement:

My work inves­ti­gates the physical/tangible beau­ty of com­mon­place mass-pro­duced media-objects, most recent­ly: the news­pa­per, mag­a­zines, office papers and writ­ing pads, plas­tic bags, 35 mm slides. These media are becom­ing obso­lete, replaced by the invis­i­ble effi­cien­cy of var­i­ous tech­nolo­gies. In some cas­es, this tran­si­tion is a good thing- faster trans­mis­sion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of infor­ma­tion, stream­lined sys­tems, open­ness to user input, less waste. But a hole is left behind by the dis­ap­pear­ance of these every­day objects. What will hap­pen when we no longer touch infor­ma­tion? When newsprint does not rub off onto our fin­ger­tips? When we no longer write longhand?

The tedious hand­i­work and obses­sive care I employ to cre­ate my work aims to remind the view­er of these sim­ple but inti­mate pieces of every­day life and to pro­voke a pang of nos­tal­gia for the famil­iar phys­i­cal­i­ty of these objects.

All images via her web­site.