Claudia Parducci’s skywriting and coded text paintings are focused on the intersections of language, anxiety and imagined catastrophe. Parducci’s work is informed by her obsession with current events, and her memories of her father, a former US Navy Morse Code operator.
In the coded text paintings dashes and dots float across the surface and recede into space, or fragment into simple marks. Cobbled together on separate pieces of paper or canvases, they form a collection of letters/marks highlighting the construction and limitations of both language and image. Phrases are cryptic harbingers of public or historical disaster expressed in a now-discontinued form of naval and wartime communication.
In contrast, the skywriting paintings imply a more intimate kind of disaster, undercutting the conventional romanticism of the skyscape. The sky becomes a placeholder for “out there” and the words become a cry to Mom, to God or to a lover.