Artist Note

My work unfolds in a variety of media. By merging several, at times seemingly incompatible worlds into a new environment, I create spatial compositions that generate poetic images and sets in between recognition and alienation; experiential environments in which fiction and reality meet and emerge little by little. Starting point for this work is the concept of transitional space; a configuration that can at the same time define and dissolve boundaries among different places. Without transitions spatial dualities like intimate-public or inside-outside might have been impossible. By creating, connecting, overlaying and dispersing selected architectures in the form of scale models and within the actual space, I let them enter a "conversation" with each other and with the actual environment. Spatial concepts, symbols and theoretical discourses always play a key role in my pcractice. Elements like the house, the corridor, the labyrinth, the door merge together with archive and found images, devices such as mirrors, telescopes and time systems. The "models" function for me as a reference, as a poetic and abstract metaphor, as a vehicle to exploit a spatial discourse. This is why I use those repeatedly in different manners and not strictly underlined with only one meaning. Every time they appear in my work they receive a new paradoxical quality in order to redefine and enhance them in my artistic vocabulary and conceptual system. The results of the current investigation are sculptural objects, deconstructed sets, conceptual configurations, frictions to the extent that meaning is shifted. Boundaries among objects and spaces dissolve and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. Known places juxtapose to imaginary, familiar and unknown fuse. A warped space; a space within space, referential and associative. The actual space becomes a transition.

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Athanasios Kanakis