Teresa Burga

In later drawings, Teresa Burga produced “direct" copies of found images sourced from the internet and newspapers. These versions were incredibly labor-intensive for the artist to create as she relied on a painstaking process that required her to carefully copy the outlines of forms and then fill them in with tiny dots. While this technique alludes to that of Pointillism, it also more specifically recalls that of Ben-Day dots, an inexpensive method used to create photomechanical prints.

In Untitled (contigo...) final de la obra - octuber 2013 - viernes 18 - hora: - 08:06 P.M. (2013), Burga employed this pseudo-mechanical approach to copy the same source material three times. Carefully recording the time it took her to create the triptych—clocking in and out—she draws parallels between artistic creation and other forms of labor. Recreating by hand a mechanical process intended for mass image dissemination, the artist challenges the labor hierarchy, which privileges innovation over reproduction.