Judith Allen /  Jeff Badger /  Lydia Badger /  Melinda Barnes /  Lucinda Bliss /  Allison Cooke Brown /  Eirene Efstathiou /  Richard Hutchins /  Barak Levi Olins /  Rebecca FitzPatrick /  Yeshe Parks /  Sean Foley /  Alex Sax /  Sage Lewis /  Aaron T Stephan /  Sam Van Aken / 

Eirene Efstathiou

I am interested in found images, as byproducts, declarations, interpretations, and negations of the thing we call history. My painting technique is deeply inspired by my source material, which ranges from, grainy home movies, to news photos, to film stills etc. I am interested in the mediations created by mimicking this source material; I see the inevitable breakdown that happens to the image as it undergoes so many transformations as a way to describe the mediations of memory and nostalgia.

When are these images evocative, and when do they become disjointed from the more personal narrative of our lives? When can we identify with the “official explanation,” and when does it fall short? Cropping editing and finally painting from these images is meant to create a subjective space where the boundaries between these categories become blurred, a point from which to interrogate how we understand and reconstruct the past. Within this space I hope to create a narrative, which lies outside the temporal boundaries of linear histories, but mirrors our experience, which is multivalent and simultaneous.

I think about my own background, which is a constant negotiation between two countries, languages, and worldviews in much the same way.

Ms. Efstathiou holds a BFA from Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. In 2003, she was a recipient of the Albert Henry Whitin Traveling Scholarship and in 2005 Ms. Efstathiou was published in New American Painting, no. 56. She lives and works in Athens, Greece.

The paintings of Eirene Efstathiou will be exhibited in the Portland Museum of Art Bienniel exhibition in June 2007.

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Index Fragment 2, xerox lithograph, 2004

Index Fragment 1, xerox lithograph, 2004

Index/Blowup, detail, oil and acrylic on panel, 2003