12/5/2005
Eleni Kamma
Vamiali, Athens
Solo show. In her various size drawings made with very basic materials, tracing paper and color ink, the artist presents a familiar and seductive world. Her practise is approaching the logics of the puzzle and the Lego game. She traces and composes on the semi transparent surface of the paper elements and references from diverse worlds by joining together self-references with external influences.
Solo show
In her various size drawings made with very basic materials, tracing paper and color ink, Kamma presents a familiar and seductive world. Her practise is approaching the logics of the puzzle and the Lego game. She traces and composes on the semi transparent surface of the paper elements and references from diverse worlds by joining together self-references with external influences. She organises the space of the paper by coping for example, the outline of the Lego game but at the same time adopts the process of how to play the game as the process of producing the actual work. The drawing of an everyday object is interrupted by an architectural sketch, the characteristics of the human face turned into a decoration pattern, the outline of a church in Santorini island repeats itself irrationally, connecting pre existing forms and images, fragments and extracts of other narratives.
Fra Giovanni Giocondo’s da Verona illustrations of Roman architect’s Vitruvius manuscripts, became the starting point for the group of miniatures drawings titled "Ideal frames, ideal peopleâ€. In this group Kamma uses the predesigned frame of the found illustration as a vignette where she occupies the main area with complicated and busy writing with elements from modern architecture, children book illustration like Sarah Kay and Petticoat stickers.
The interest in her drawings focuses in those parts that in the beginning are traced and then removed in a kind of non continuity, leaving the viewer to decide the accomplishment of an uncompleted reality. Order and chaos in Kamma’s works appear not as a disorder but as a schizoid impulse of a saturated world of images. Constructed in scales and by breaking the given hierarchy, her works create levels to flattening, they focus in the research process of the representation of the perspective, the viewing and the perception. The deconstruction of a given order, without introducing any sentimental loading, reflects complex scenarios between abstraction and figuration.
Kamma refers to her work †Through my drawings I examine the possibilities of utopian, ideal, floating, even chaotic spaces created by an irrational collage of forms, coming from various pre-existent given ideologies and stereotypes. I like the tracing paper because of its lightness, its chameleon-like way to adjust to space and the fact that the way the image is produced on it is at the same time the reason for the paper’s existenceâ€.
Eleni Kamma was born in Athens in 1973. She studied at the School of Fine Art in Athens and received her MA from Chelsea College in London. She had her works featured in “Photosyngyriaâ€, Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki, “Domestic Alienâ€, Centre of Contemporary Art Ileana Tounta, “The Drawing Projectâ€, vamiali’s, “Autotopiaâ€, Nerv, among others.
Opening: Friday 13 May 2005 From 20.00
Vamiali's
Samou 1 - Athens
Tuesday-Friday 13.00-20.00 Saturday by appointment