TOM BORGAS
Action 4: Form: Material: Content
Draw three longitudinal waves with varying amplitude and frequency.
Name the individual waves Form, Material, Content respectively.
Mark three sections/moments where the waves do not intersect and list waves in hierarchical order.
Create three identical pieces that reflect each hierarchy.
Tom Borgas is an Adelaide-based visual artist working from a sculptural foundation across multiple platforms including gallery and project work, public sculpture, festival interventions, performance and education. His research finds its inspiration in the blurry spaces between image and object, virtual and physical, maker and viewer. Borgas’ work has been shown at galleries and venues across Australia. His practice continues to expand through commissioning agents including UAP, Stockroom and MARS gallery Melbourne and the Adelaide Festival Centre. His practice has also been supported through organisations including the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts South Australia, NAVA, Guildhouse and The Helpmann Academy.
For On Being an Artist, Borgas begins with three sets of numerical values, all generated as a result of his instruction. Matched to the x, y and z axis, these values guide a series of permutations that extend on Gerrit Rietveld’s orthogonally sublime Red Blue Chair (1917). Frozen in place by armatures dressed in the metric stripes of calibration devices, the three permutations are encoded with the variations that brought them into being. Amongst the sculptural network of vectors, modernist icons hover suspended in chaotic free-fall– the functionality and formal resolution of the original design methodically displaced.