via
Unchanging Window, here!
Ashes to Ashes is a spectral assemblage of material facts and artefacts from Greece, carefully chosen from the antique store Martinos, and works from ten contemporary artists, where the old is exhibited back-to-back to the new. In one way or another, all participating artists use a specific source as their starting point, which they manipulate and coax until it becomes something completely different. The exhibited works are presented side by side with antiquities, a juxtaposition coming close to emulating the sort of psychedelic experience one gets while visiting Athens, with its ancient ruins shifting so easily into modern day realities.
In Martinos Art, the antique store located near the gallery, one can find fragile figures, statuettes, vases, vessels and pottery, which, rather than depict, actually bring forth the definition of humanist expression. While the artists involved think deeply and tactilely about references and associations within their own work, the artefacts exhibited can only draw upon the reference of existence and ritual as they arguably predate any other piece of “art” in time.
Ashes to Ashes is an exhibition of the unusual and circumstantiated personal interpretations of both these archaic and modern aspects of the everyday.
The sources used by the participating artists to develop their work are wide-ranging and broad in scope, coming from nature (as, for instance, in Anne Eastman’s moon video and Ara Peterson’s wave patterns), speech and text (as, for instance, in Matthew Higg’s reframing of printed matter and Johanna Billing’s recordings), technology as, for instance, in Jo Jackson’s prints of cracking bowls, Hayley Tompkins’ painted laptop and cell phone, and Andrea Longacre-White’s digital photographs of photographs, choreography as, for instance, in Jennifer Cohen’s dance shoes-, found objects as, for instance, in Francis Upritchard’s second hand finds, and photography itself as, for instance, in Anne Collier’s photographic works.
------------------------------------