Duo solo show Dio Horia Gallery
Marina Velisioti’s artistic subjects for the works on view—as well as the source of endless inspiration for most of her practice—are UFOs and the alternative worlds of both fiction and crypto-science alike. The pieces included in the show revolve around sci-fi’s common accoutrement to alien planets and intergalactic travel: gates and portals. Taking an aesthetic cue from the style idiom and color schemes of the Memphis group’s bright 1980s neon hues and groundbreakingly postmodernist rearticulations of Art Deco geometry, Velisioti revivifies their programmatically anachronistic logic to create a visual and conceptual dialogue between the ancient and the speculative knowledge realms that invite the viewer to explore the space where reality and fantasy converge. In this way, the artist’s embroideries, floating along the gallery walls like portals to a different civilizational dimension, appear as if implements of some mythic pre-Columbian Incan ritual were to be designed by MTV’s art director circa 1984.
Velisioti’s bold deployment of color and decade-hopping suggest further and more profound implications, as well. When faced with new primary colors he’s never seen before, colors that don’t exist on Earth, and that the regular earthly vocabulary doesn’t have the language to justly describe, one of the protagonists of David Lindsay’s classic Art Deco-era sci-fi novel A Voyage to Arcturus finds himself in need to resort to the purely sensual: “Just as blue is delicate and mysterious, yellow clear and unsubtle, and red sanguine and passionate, he felt [the new colors] to be wild and painful; and dreamlike, devilish, and voluptuous.” In his analysis and critique of Lindsay’s conceptual invention, Fredric Jameson has once written that from it, we may posit an allegorical relationship between the two: to be able to imagine a new color is allegorical of being able to imagine a completely new social order, “for a new quality already begins to demand a new kind of perception, and that new perception in turn a new organ of perception, and that ultimately a new kind of body,” and, we might add, a new form of citizenship and society-building.
Velisioti’s installation is, indeed, enriched by a perpetually oscillating variety of sensual textures and haptic experiences: the stand-alone ceramic and textile pieces are interspersed by running tracks of self-adhesive mirror strips, adding complex layers to the viewer’s experience through the intermix of matt and reflective surfaces that multiply and distort the space, enhancing the idea of exiting into a different reality from the one that lays outside the gallery walls. The tactile nature of the ceramics and embroideries further contrasts with the ethereal quality of the mirrors, blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined, the tangible and the optical. Finally, the fluorescent lamps in the light installations further contribute to this otherworldly ambiance, infusing the gallery with an eerie, dreamlike glow. Together, these elements invite the viewer to step into a world where time and perception are fluid, and the line between the known and the unknown remains constantly shifting.