level 6
Academic year 2018-2019
My practice, as a body of work is composed by experimentalism, chance, playfulness and sexuality. Thematically, concerning my selection of images, I am mainly interested in the production of paintings that examine the fragility and suffering of the exposed flesh on the human body. As it is inseparable from the body, the mind has a main role in the collective of art with my approach to it being the mind games that are framed into the delivery of the messages my work attempts to inspire.
After studying the attitude of the phenomenon that emerged during the 1960s, namely Fluxus, I got influenced by the playful character of the works produced by Fluxus artists. I got amused by and therefore decided to adopt in my work the humorous flair and performative nature of their art. Performance is not always my preffered practice, although I consider it to be a method that helps me gain the power to offer the audience the ability to participate and eventually be part of the art, similar ways that the works of Yoko Ono and Naim June Paik were established through Fluxus. In my ‘La Pettite Mort” piece, I performed such offer of connection to the audience by the creation of a game as the only way to access the art.
Since the start of this academic year I have produced a body of digital drawings. The final piece which I am planning to be present will be an online ‘treasure haunt’ of the artwork. The participant is required to have an electronic device that has internet access. Starting point is probably going to be something physical like a QR code or a given link that lead the participant to series of online objects like riddles or games, forms and questions. These stops between links are going to be the steps that the viewer needs to do in order to end up in a digital gallery in which my drawings are going to be in display.
Nude art has been represented in paintings and statues since pre-history and now the media is saturated with sexual and beautified imagery. Painting-technique wise, I can never remove Lucian Freud from the back of my head, since I naturally place pieces of color guided by his influence although I use a different medium and frequency.
Following that, the figures in the drawings are usually hidden and often turned away from the viewer like Michael Alford’s nude studies but with the difference that my figures are always incomplete, like paint strokes are missing.
It is a collection of small works put together in a bright room in contrast to Carolee Schneemann’s exhibition Kinematic Paintings that features over 300 works from the start of her practice (ephemera of her fluxus days in the 60s), that loop across 14 screens suspended from the ceiling.
My selection of presenting work constitutes the most important for me part of the piece since I am doing that as a suggestion for a virtual gallery. I am attempting to challenge the person who is interested in to going through a set of actions to reach art, to do so electronically but using the same amount of energy and thought. For example, one needs to travel and walk in a gallery to view physical paintings hung on walls so it will need the same amount of energy in my suggested e-gallery to reach the artwork , for which the ‘steps’ or games are essential. Doing so, the participator is also morally investigated since they are doing all this so that they will end up to an image the nude. It’s a piece that challenges the viewer to be indiscriminate and even get rude in order to view the art as the reflection of my work often comes out in forms of questions. Do I intend for the art to be erotic?to make a political/relegious statement? Or am I just drawing it to study the human body? It is a feature that comes with the nude since it triggers intimate thoughts and bring out a intimate sense to the process hence an uncomfortable feeling of uncertainity to the viewers.
For the online exhibit needed something physical to start with like a drawing with a QR code hidden in it which will be either an oil painting or a print of a digital drawing. After scanning the code, the participant will have access to the remaining piece through their devices and the internet, viz the partaker is essential for the presentation.
For an oil painting I would need: a preferably large canvas, oil or acrylic paints, charcoal, water, brushes
For the production of the drawings and potentially a print I use the software ‘Sketches’ through an Apple Ipad creating virtual paintings then exported as images and printed on A1 glossy white paper.
DEGREE SHOW
In this year’s Degree show I am going to be setting up a body of work consisted of a series of digitally painted images, which are going to be printed in different sizes and put up on a pink-painted wall of the construction we will be manifesting with the help of our technician. The series are titled ‘ΠΕΡΙΠΑΙΖΩ”, and the images are portraits or figures, in which I am holding up a mirror to society, exposing the ways in which social media are organizing sexualities and how young people experiment, observe while getting educated on their sexuality. The attempt is to capture and recreate the emotion behind this common desire through the young people’s interactions within social media.
The images were digitally painted on an Apple iPad 6th gen, using a stylus and through the application ‘Tayasui Sketches’ which is a poly-media creative stimulator.
Images are inspired by pictures found in social media and in messages from other individuals, but none is a copy and these people most probably do not exist, therefore not been used for the making of this project.
The digital paintings are printed by a Photography shop in Fine Art textured paper and are different in sizes.
Looking into the work of contemporary feminist artists like Hend Al-Mansour and Sarah Maple I have been inspired to direct my artwork into the exploration of the complexities of faith, social belief systems and feminism today, and the questioning of identity and sexuality. Also influenced by the work of female artists that painted women like Dora Carrington and studied the painting techniques of painters like Lucian Freud.
My inspiration was also triggered by researches carried by Sinder De Ridder, and by Traci A Giulano with Sarah C. Gomillion. From Riddler’s studies, online and offline behaviors young people display in romantic relationships are closely related, referring to both material and symbolical contexts in which social media are organizing sexualities, as in inspiring the confused youth to allow themselves to reshape sexual norms.
As similarly put by Homegrown media in their studies of restricted sexuality and young indian artists, the standards of what is acceptable and what is supposed to be deserving a censorship are very corrupt. Young India artists like Roshini Kumar in their series ‘BARE’ and ‘PUSSY AND PATRON’ they show an unfiltered and unapologetic tribute to sexual freedom.
Arists like Pulkit Mogha, who correctly said that we need to stop resisting whatever makes us feel uncomfortable, along with Aditya Yerma, Sam Madha and a lot of artists whose their work get put down daily online go through a learning curve to find loopholes in the platforms’s systems and managed to make their work seen.
Other artists and groups worth mentioning: Senju Shunga, Petites Luxures, Ellie Smallwood, Regards Coupables, Fabio Bacchini, Stephanie Sarley, Sam Morris, Smell of Sleep
The paintings feature in them figures that act as symbols of certain mental interactions and as a result they work as the visualization of feelings in relatable human forms. Since these feelings I am attempting to project cannot be placed in time and place, the figures are nude because clothing and accessories insert cultural context to the image .
In my previous work, I have presented part of this body of paintings through a platform that had some restrictive parameters that stopped a part of the audience to view the work. Having my work presented in such way made it suffer and some of the audience was automatically excluded from the artwork. After experiencing my work suffering in this way I have decided to put my artwork back into the gallery space and the same time decided to bring nude back into the gallery space even after the Guerilla Girls told the world that a female can enter the museum only as a nude painting.
