ELEFTERIA VLAVIANOS

‘The Feeling of Memory’ is a series of paintings in which Elefteria is concerned with how memory, or more precisely post-memory, is passed from one generation to another. The issue of post-memory and the stories that accompany it are complex, fragile, and from her experience coexist with rituals of remembering, retrieval, and renewal.

In this series of works, Elefteria draws on her pleasure in the most intimate of details relating to the smallest of cultural and personal objects. The motif of the oval buried within the ground of the painted surface is a reference to two visual ideas. The first is that of an oval locket, one that she inherited from her Armenian grandmother; the second is from photography, that of a photographic oval vignette. In this current body of paintings the oval motif is a symbolic and poetic link to the idea of a keepsake.

The development of these paintings coincides with her love for working with wax as a medium and as a surface. Wax is an important medium for Elefteria because it is a substance that has the ability to form a physical memory, is fragile and has the potential to form a resistant barrier. In addition, these material characteristics simultaneously tie into thematic and conceptual issues such as fragility, remembering and resistance. Upon this layer, she often uses a repetitive singular mark that she thinks of as a tacking stitch. This stitch, in turn, references her first engagement with the aesthetics of embroidery and carpet weaving as a child.

These elements are brought together with a further consideration prevalent in Elefteria’s practice that of the process and methodologies of reductionism, its path to minimal abstraction and its poetics. In this visual orbit, a key question for her is: how to bring together the stimuli of a diasporic history into a contemporary context that facilitates new visual possibilities?