| Black
& White Gallery, New York, NY is proud
to present Refused Reused by Konstantinos
Stamatiou.
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.
Konstantinos
Stamatiou lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and
Athens, Greece. He has had solo shows at the Huntington
Art Gallery in Austin, TX, Tsatsis Projects in
Thessaloniki, Greece, and Black & White Gallery
in Brooklyn, NY, among others. He has been the
recipient of the Carolyn Kay “Katie”
Davis Centennial Memorial scholarship, the Eugenie
Kamrath Mygdal scholarsip in sculpture, the College
of Fine Arts Dean’s Travel scholarship,
and the Angeline M.Umlauf scholarship in sculpture.
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