NYAB Event - Konstantinos Stamatiou "Refused Reused"

This event has ended.
At Black and White (Chelsea)
Media: Other, Installation

The exhibition is comprised of an installation, collages and light boxes created with non-traditional materials. Like a modern-day maze, each of the works draws us into a multilayered labyrinth of social issues and various forms of physical interaction between the work of art and its viewer.

In AIRBOX (2003-2006), Stamatiou creates a bunker-like monochromatic futuristic monument housing various domestic appliances and structures that come straight from the pages of science fiction. To recast these almost forgotten future-pasts, the artist uses unglamorous materials - semi-transparent industrial plastics, foam and paper to build the bunker and its content thus blurring the line between public and private, collective and individual where the past ideals of collective action led the forward march of history.

The CORPORATE CHARTS SERIES (2008 - 2009) examines themes of faltering economies and environmental deterioration. Stamatiou attacks the corporate mentality with an art of unconventional materials and style, focusing on charts as systems of classification. To recreate the stock price charts of two ‘penny stock’ companies producing alternative energy (BLVD) and biotechnology (PLSO), he builds elaborate collages with found objects of consumer waste – plastic water bottles, plastic drinking straws and electrical wires. In the light box titled CEO, Putting Pay For Performance First (analysis of 2006 compensation for top executives of major US corporations), he reuses glass from a broken window of a bank where he saw the original chart. Other works include ZINC, ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE and WIND BURST light boxes (2009), each of which documents a different natural phenomenon revealing the artist’s interest in the relationship between chance and order and focus on the transformative powers of energy as well as on the possibilities and limitations of chance.

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