One person’s obsession with barcodes makes for a quirky and fun exhibit at the Somerville Museum: “Barcode Journeys,” which blends art with the history of automation and a nod toward its future.
The exhibit is curated by Barbara Fash, who goes by Barbara Jo, as part of the museum’s community curator program. The exhibit continues her smaller 2022 show, “My Year in Barcode,” in which she collected the objects for a year and began to make art with them.
“Barcode Journeys” is more collaborative, incorporating several other artists and mediums. A highlight is the work of Cindy Ramírez, whose woven piece “QR Textile” painstakingly renders a QR code using sheep’s wool on a frame. In emulating a scannable link with such a tactile medium, Ramírez brings beauty to an everyday object. There’s plenty of whimsy in the show, too: in “Flight Delay,” Jo playfully mounts luggage tags onto foam core.
Jo has been a professional archaeological illustrator for more than 45 years, drawing Maya artifacts in Central America and Mexico. It was some time into her barcode obsession before she saw how these symbols paralleled ancient hieroglyphs. With that realization, she was able to add an element of the mystical to the commonplace.
A prime example is “Glyph Poem,” a lovely abstract piece in which Jo pastes barcodes onto paper. The objects are arranged in messy lines, almost resembling a paragraph but totally illegible to the viewer. You can see why she thinks of barcodes as modern hieroglyphs. In their new existence as a piece of art, they puzzle viewers rather than expedite transactions.
Like ancient hieroglyphs, barcodes might someday be mysterious and incomprehensible to the machines and humans of the future. Automation brings efficiency, Jo argues, but takes away some aspect of our humanity. In making these familiar things strange, Jo has succeeded in playfully evoking questions about the prevalence of machines in modern life – and in society’s increasing and rather soulless reliance on automation.
As part of the exhibition programming, artist Cindy Ramírez performs Oct. 29. The museum celebrates its building’s centennial at an Oct. 23 fundraising party; tickets are $100.
“Barcode Journeys” at the Somerville Museum, 1 Westwood Road, in the Spring Hill neighborhood. $8, free to museum members and visitors under the age of 12 and to the public on the first Friday of every month.
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