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Traces
January 7, 2016 - March 6, 2016
Exhibit Dates
Thursday, January 7, 2016 to Sunday, March 6, 2016
Reception date & time
Thursday, January 7, 7:00pm
Description
For the solo exhibition Traces, Ottawa-based multidisciplinary artist Christos Pantieras brings together five of his existing series, all of which explore, appropriate, and recontextualize the remnants of everyday human practices.
Pantieras’ work seamlessly combines contemporary cultural obsessions with preservation methods of the past. Carbon paper, analogue photography, molded cement as a surrogate for carved stone; traditional materials are reanimated by Pantieras’ hand to channel comparatively recent conversations with friends and lovers, with family, and sometimes with the self. Not only intimate, these are also inherently ephemeral dialogues that would otherwise be lost to the march of time and to the fundamental impossibility of archiving everything we do.
Within the context of The ArQuives –a repository for both the monumental and mundane narratives that trace Canadian queer history– Pantieras’ dual focus on the past and present, the forgotten and the remembered, the intangible and the tangible, is especially meaningful. By concretizing queer narratives both literally and figuratively, and by monumentalizing the seemingly small and insignificant, Christos Pantieras’ work implores us not to forget. It asks us to view the past and the present as a continuum, and to reconnect our meaningful human actions to the traces they leave behind.
Biographies:
Christos Pantieras is a multidisciplinary artist who works in sculpture, installation, photography, and mixed media. His practice explores the frailty of personal connections and the humanism that is lost when interacting online. He received a BFA from the University of Ottawa (1996) and an MFA from York University (2015). Pantieras has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa. Select exhibitions include The Ottawa Art Gallery, Modern Fuel ARC, White Water Gallery, and the Luminato Festival.