Monday, February 23, 2015

Pair Production

Using Efstathiou’s wall piece Cloud Chamber as a starting point, this two-person exhibition and short residency at New Court Gallery has been informed by aesthetic qualities extracted by a scattered Physics glossary and the co-habitation of two differentiated art practices. Under the conditions of the ‘isolated’ environment of the empty exhibition-studio space reminiscent of a cloud chamber as ‘a sealed environment where charged particles may leave ionized tracks distinctive in various shapes indicating different types of collisions’, Maria Efstathiou and Margarita Myrogianni have merged their artistic practices by coming up with mixed-media explorations through aesthetic interpretations inspired by such scientific terminology. Annihilation, energized particles, matter and anti-matter, growth formation, suspension of phenomena, have been phrases used during the artists’ stay whilst working on new and existing work brought in from their Athens studios. The outcome of this endeavor has involved exposing their methodologies by focusing on the preparatory stages and seeing the process as the end product via a metaphorical take on the term pair production as ‘a direct conversion of radiant energy to matter’. Text by Maria Georgoula

New Court Gallery, Repton, Derbyshire, Feb.2015