Pelagia Kyriazi
by NY Arts
Recently Pelagia Kyriazi exhibited work at the International Print Center New York in the exhibition The Lure of Diversity: New Prints 2002/Autumn.
Marilyn Kushner, one of the organizers of the exhibition said of Kyriazi’s work Final Domicile Mother/Father, "Poignantly, Pelagia Kyriazi, in her moving depiction of tombstones, communicates that isolation produced by the death of a preceding generation as well as the transience of life and of material things in this world. No one, and few things, survive forever."
Kyriazi’s own statement about the work follows.
My interest in death and in the final destination, to which we are all bound, actually began long before it could be manifested artistically. Over the years in thinking of family and the loss of loved ones I hypothesized as to their final abode. Consequently, when I visited Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery with a friend whose family is buried there, I finally initiated the materialization process of the idea that germinated so many years ago. It was a cold, cloudy day in 1995 that in its poeticism appealed to my senses and I began photographing gravestones. The black and white film was a suitable medium to capture the grayness of the day and the sorrowful gloominess of the environment bringing about an impact about the finality of death.
These colorless shots acted as a matrix for me to launch a creative investigation of different printmaking techniques combining photography and silkscreen. I printed the images on sandpaper of varying grain that resulted in textured compositions that strengthened the melancholy tone of my theme. By increasing the grainy quality of the support I was able to affect a blurriness that was analogous to the fading out of life itself. I worked with the juxtaposition of negative and positive figures and space. On the black sandpaper the shapes materialize as phantasms if the paint application is tightly controlled or varied according to desired effect. Key to this technique is finding the balance that renders a sensitive print.
