Date/Time
Date(s) - April 6, 2023
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Categories
We are no longer beings but sensations
DXIX Projects
Office K102A
Department of Art and Art History, Colorado State University
551 W. Pitkin Street, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA (visitors can park at the Lory Student Center parking)
April 6 – August 15, 2023 (open through the summer)
Opening: April 6, 5:00 – 7:00 pm; Artist talk between 5:00 and 5:30 pm, opening will follow
Opening hours: By appointment
DXIX is pleased to present We are no longer beings but sensations, a solo exhibition project by artist Marina Kassianidou. This project is a site-responsive installation of works that fit within and are framed by existing elements in the space of K102A Office. The works primarily include paintings and collages on patterned fabrics, engineered wood, and wood-patterned vinyl. These mass-produced surfaces are commonly found in domestic spaces, forming part of the constructed interior landscapes in which we exist.
Due to the artist’s process of working and her sometimes small and subtle gestures, confusion arises between the printed images, the collaged marks, the natural marks, and the painted marks. The works sometimes emerge as paintings, sometimes as collages, and sometimes as readymade fabrics or as pieces of wood. They, thus, challenge the viewers’ eyes, asking them to pay attention to seemingly straightforward materials. Marina’s interventions turn these materials into objects of study and visual excavation, bringing them to the foreground while uncovering their complexity and contradictions. She aims for a gradual shift in perception, an increase in awareness and sensitization that partially turns these materials and the space itself into a field of sensations. Marina’s interventions provoke a re-signification of their surrounding built environment. Her interventions perform as arrows that point at this specific site (the office environment) enhancing aesthetic agencies latent in its everyday functional appearance. As a result of this process, the everyday office work environment becomes the subject of careful aesthetic consideration and observation. Ordinary details from walls, windows, carpet, shelf, table, chairs, outlets, sideboards, surfaces, textures, colors, now become remarkable formal events surfacing from the realm of the uneventful, barely visible mundane, and presenting themselves to the viewer as a baroque ensemble of visual experiences. Marina’s work seems to be aligned with those poetics of “the endotic”. The endotic is an artistic or literary practice that focuses on the ordinary as opposed to the extraordinary, the exotic. However, in an interesting plot twist, the ordinary or minor in Marina’s work is rich and exuberant.