DAILY SERVING » Greek mythology

Fan Mail: Eva Voutsaki

Alia Al-Sabi — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 08:00:51 +0000

Mythology, memory, and a fascination with the nocturnal are some of the underlying themes in Eva Voutsaki’s photographs. Originally from Drakona, a small village on the island of Crete in Greece, the artist documents and commemorates the unique way in which she understands her ongoing experience as a “modern immigrant.” Now living in Brighton, UK, Voutsaki grapples with notions of migration and belonging, and the ways in which photography can become a window into a shared, relatable world.

Eva Voutsaki. From the Traces Within series, 2006-2016. Courtesy of the Artist.

One of Voutsaki’s more autobiographical projects, Traces Within (2006–2016) is an exhibition of an unraveling childhood. In this body of work, a series of thirty photographs embody Voutsaki’s excavation of memories from her distant past. The artist doesn’t plan or construct her photographs—her strategy simply involves walking around with a manual Nikon camera to capture shots on impulse. In one of the images from this series, a child is caught in mid-movement near some swimming turtles. The artist describes the scene of as one that caught her off guard and compelled her to capture the moment. Soon after she developed the film, the reason behind Voutsaki’s compulsion became clear: The image evoked memories of the week she left her village at the age of fifteen, a time that coincided with her grandmother’s and dog’s deaths.

Eva Voutsaki. From the Traces Within series, 2006-2016. Courtesy of the Artist.

In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory and the mother of all the Muses, the goddesses that inspire literature, science, and the arts. For Voutsaki, whose early education included stories from mythology, this distinction is fundamental. In 2008, her attraction to mythology resurfaced in the process of developing her work, when she realized that much of her photography evokes notions of creative output as related to memory. In one photograph in the Traces Within series, a blurry image of a dog walking in darkness conjures Voutsaki’s memory of spending nights at her grandmother’s house, with the sound of the wailing wind and the creaking door eliciting fears of being attacked by a wolf.

Eva Voutsaki. From the Traces Within series, 2006-2016. Courtesy of the Artist.

Voutsaki doesn’t use a tripod and takes photographs only at night. Desired aesthetic qualities emerge from these decisions, but they originate in her early ways of seeing—a night owl by nature, Voutsaki used her premature bedtime hours to outline shapes of shadows reflected on her bedroom ceiling. The night is when one can “discover the light of the darkness,” she says. An astigmatism in one eye also means that her natural mode of viewing lacks focus; when she was a child, looking out her window, the moon appeared to be “breathing.” Voutsaki finds the blurriness in her photographs a more accurate reflection of her vantage.

Eva Voutsaki. From the Traces Within series, 2006-2016. Courtesy of the Artist.

Voutsaki’s more recent in-progress projects Achronos (“timeless”) and Homo Ruralis (“rural human being”) are an exploration of the artist’s experiences of departure and transition. In Achronos, she documents objects that remind her of the home that she has carried with her in her travels. Homo Ruralis is a photojournalistic exercise that captures the lives and times of her small village of 100 people. She has another project that archives the photographs of the village elders in an interactive family sketchbook; photography is a way of working with both the extant past and what will someday become memory. Voutsaki’s practice is an extension of the more intimate contours of her passage through life.

Eva Voutsaki. From the Homo Ruralis series. Courtesy of the Artist.

Eva Voutsaki is a photographer and educator based in Brighton, UK. Her project Traces Within has been awarded honorable mentions at the 2008 and 2009 PX3 Paris Photography Prize competition in the category of Fine Art Student, and has been internationally recognized and exhibited at the 2009 Arles juried festival Voies Off; the 2010 Rome Fotografia Festival at the MACRO Museum of Contemporary Arts; BOM gallery in Seoul; Menier and HOST gallery in London; and the F Photobook Show at the Tokyo Institute of Photography in 2014. The artist will self-publish Traces Within as a photobook in 2016.

Hammer Projects: Mary Reid Kelley at Hammer Museum

Bean Gilsdorf — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 07:00:57 +0000

Now on view at Hammer Museum, Mary Reid Kelley’s videos are a collision of drawing, performance, and wordplay that clatter against Greek mythology to produce a visually spare, lexically rich cycle. Working with videographer Patrick Kelley, the artist has produced three black-and-white videos that follow the story of the half-woman, half-bull Minotaur, her lust-crazed mother Pasiphae, and her helpless sister Ariadne through boldly drawn landscapes. A complex weave of alienation and irreverence burlesques the original stories to create a spectacle that is equal parts tragedy and farce.

Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley. Priapus Agonistes, 2013 (video still); single-channel HD video, black and white, sound; 15:09. Courtesy of the Artists; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York; and Pilar Corrias, London.

The ancient tales are spiked with contemporary elements, and crisis is contrasted with absurd humor. The first video, Priapus Agonistes (2013), sets the drama in a small-town gymnasium, where the outcome of a volleyball game will determine the next sacrifice to the Minotaur. The cocksure Priapus (“the one-eyed Prince of Athens”) swaggers onto the court and wins handily, but as he mocks Ariadne and Pasiphae, the camera pans down to the labyrinth underneath, where the Minotaur paces—hunting not for victims, but for a bathroom. With her hands pressed to her crotch, she trots along the gray cinderblock corridors covered in graffiti left by her victims. “I hate Crete!” reads one missive; another foreshadows her fate: “Murderer! Your end is near, bitch.”

A flashback scene explains the prehistory of the Minotaur. Queen Pasiphae sunbathes with Venus, who has the face of a bulldog. After trading jealous barbs replete with innuendo and double entendres, Venus zaps Pasiphae with a curse that makes her mad with lust for a bull. She taunts her rival, “Well, your china shop will take new dynamics / When I put a bull in your ceramics. / We have our beef! And I am vowed, / Proud Pasiphae, to make you cowed.” Pasiphae struts and preens, Venus throws shade, and the act could have been subtitled The Real Housewives of Crete.

Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley. Swinburne’s Pasiphae, 2014 (video still); HD video, black and white, sound; 8:58. Courtesy of the Artists; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York; and Pilar Corrias, London.

Swinburne’s Pasiphae (2014) takes its dialogue from 18th-century English writer Algernon Charles Swinburne. Although the piece is as linguistically dense, it is not flippant and acts as a foil to the sassy banter of the other plays. Pasiphae approaches craftsman Daedalus to build her a cow-shaped decoy so she can crawl inside and mate with a bull. Daedalus doesn’t question her desire; he measures, saws, and hammers away happily, fully invested in the industry of creation, while Pasiphae tries to cool her heat with prescription drugs and lowbrow magazines. The video takes on a somber tone at the end, with a voiceover intoning, “…and all day / Thy tempest-shaken spirit shakes thee through / And thy spent body sickens with thy soul” as the scene shifts to the estranged Minotaur lying on the floor of the desolate labyrinth, her torso heaving with sobs.

Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley. The Thong of Dionysus, 2015 (video still); HD video, black and white, sound; 9:27. Courtesy of the Artists; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York; and Pilar Corrias, London.

The final and most lively act, The Thong of Dionysus (2015), begins with a drunk Dionysus—looking a lot like Weird Al Yankovic—lolling on a chaise lounge, with the maenads chorusing behind him. He narrates his own grape-laden manifesto of debauchery before turning to the matter of Ariadne’s plight: She mourns her own abandonment by her libidinous mother and the death of her sister as the sea rises all around her. A confused Priapus wanders in the maze before finally happening onto the Minotaur, who is already dead from loneliness. Here, Dionysus’s caustic monologue tugs the narrative thread running between the eccentric elements of the entire cycle, pulling the contemporary back to Greek philosophy:

In a Labyrinth, everyone thinks they’re a prince,
In control of a string which will bring them back home,
Oh, I’ve written a Thesis on Theseus syndrome.

You start by believing your brain’s little voices,
I’m in charge of my life! I’m the sum of my choices!
Spend all of your time like a mime in a box,
acting smart in a carton, showing off in your coffin!

You hate fate so can’t ask it, is this room my casket?
Do I defy gods, or am I their mascot,
their doll to inflate, their plotline to weave,
a bauble abandoned, a plaything deceived.

In the end, Priapus falls in love with the dead Minotaur and lies down beside her to die. Meanwhile, Ariadne comes to Dionysus’s den and tries to kill herself. The maenads convince her that she needs “a raisin to live.” They dance all night in a permanent state of “Disco Tent.”

Reid Kelley’s other works based in Greek myth, such as The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011) and You Make Me Iliad (2010), also use sharply designed sets and clever wordplay to great effect; and the works on view at Hammer are clearly a richer measure of what came before. They are mesmerizing, but their delight is tinged with melancholy; for underneath the barbed repartee, the characters are wretched creatures bound to continue along paths that lead to their undoing. The strength of Reid Kelley’s work is in her inventiveness, reinvigorating ancient tales with contemporary perspectives. If these works seem atemporal, it’s only because lust, pride, poor choices, loneliness, and discontent are timeless.

Mary Reid Kelley is on view at Hammer Museum through September 27, 2015.