Placing the tools of figurative art at the service of complex conceptual constructions, Eleni Mylonas explores the mechanics of memory and repression, knowledge and oblivion, perception and its limits in her multifarious work, which uses photography, video, sculpture painting and installation. Although Mylona’s modernist reflection on the operation and structure of each medium often proposes a formalist and historically oriented reading on a primary level, her work is in fact deeply anthropocentric: the fragmentation of the figure: (Fragments, 1996), the return to the modernist legacy and the recontextualisation of its forms and themes (Quasi Periodic Space 1997-2000) the juxtaposition of natural and sculptural forms (Brainstorming, 2007) all become supreme tools for capturing the fragmentary experience of the contemporary subject. Similarly, in photographic series such as Journey through Ellis Island (1984), an invocation of the deserted and ruined buildings of the old immigrant reception center in New York and Universal Salvage (1991), photo-essays of abandoned American cars, Mylonas starts from the American photo-documentary tradition of Paul Strand or Edward Weston in order to create succinct images of decay in which the human element is absent. Nevertheless, she captures the traces of human presence, the decay where once there was order, the abandonment where once there was activity. There is a prevalent element of abstraction, the images becoming a comment on the function of memory; whenever a detail and a literal quality emerge—broken mirrors, torn seats, fenders falling apart—the work is recharged with a political dimension.
The Lamb of God is somehow an objet trouve. On the day of the US invasion of Iraq, Mylonas discovered the dead body of a sheep floating on the sea on a shore of the island of Aegina. Mylonas recorded the image on video and went on to create a study in paint, undermining and at the same time underlining the importance of the historical moment. In the rhythmic, peaceful and macabre movement of the body among the seaweed and the pebbles the emotional charge of the day is intensified, and the found object becomes a sound object.
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Ist Athens Biennial 2007 Destroy Athens Catalogue Essay Eleni Mylonas