Nicole Economides

In my work, I explore my own liminal vocabulary. I obscure the lines between Greece and the West and question the ownership of history. Using the romanticist gesture of painting and juxtaposing tracings of polaroid pictures, my painting-installations tease out the tensions between these concepts. I mechanize three main gestures: painting, photography, and installation. This blurs the defining lines of symbol, representation, and icon. One gesture starts to act as the other until we realize that our perception is being tampered with. Taking pictures of classicist sculptures of Ancient Greece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I explore the feeling of learning about my heritage through a Western lens in the heart of New York City, and not in Athens.

Juxtaposing these 'snapshots' with the paintings I focus on creating different narratives of time. The canvas expresses itself to architecture as Bachelard relates poetry to space. I find that installation is inevitably connected to how the work is perceived. By merging elements of the semiotic system in painting — symbols, icons, and indexes — I question narratives of the existing hierarchical systems within culture.