TOM BORGAS
BORN 1978
CLARE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA
LIVES ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA
Mining living cities, Borgas’s works enter urban fictions and draw on concrete jungle materialities. Street relics are salvaged; the fluorescent colours of high-visibility safety equipment become motifs adapted across his installations and sculptures. Working between computer-aided design and urban spaces, Borgas’s works glimmer between their 3D renderings and lived installation. Street pavers become pixels. Intricately faceted surfaces playfully mimic the reflective facades of high-rise buildings while also recalling the computer screen’s tessellated geometries.
Concrete Topology (12 maquettes), 2018
concrete, wood, acrylic paint
If all of the shattered pieces from Concrete Topology (maquettes) were reconfigured like a jigsaw, the work looks as though it would come together as a 144cm square cube. This apparent symmetry is a carefully orchestrated fiction. The shattered concrete form is playfully contrived from handcrafted fragments, each piece too clean and perfectly rock-like to be the result of urban salvage. To create each fragment of the topography, Borgas cast a cube afresh and worked its surface with stone carving tools.
Most of the concrete fragments do not require any reinforcement from a prop stand. Their intensely blue armatures inject impotency into their concrete nature by suggesting the possibility of their inability to hold themselves upright. In a similar gesture, Borgas has expressed his desire to prop up multi-storey concrete buildings to introduce doubt as to the solidity of their foundations. The mischievous irreverence with which he undermines the power of a tiny concrete block or a towering building reveals an art of destabilising forces interposed through playful tactics.