Tiny Subjects
Katerina Βotsari's new solo exhibition entitled "Tiny Subjects" includes a series of sculptural constructions that refer to the experience of the street, the way it is experienced, recorded and given meaning. A thorough observation of the urban landscape, combined with the artist's interest in antiquity in architecture, where the new building becomes obsolete very quickly, fuels her works. Βotsari's research is based on the study of anti-monumentality and how it is rendered through the assembly of materials such as liquid glass, cement and plastic. The solidification, that is, the change in the state of matter that characterizes these sculptural joints, creates an opposite effect, an icy fluidity, as if trying to close a bolt of lightning, as if capturing or freezing a firework. In the transparent sculptures of Botsari, which look like failed scientific experiments, forms, volumes, colors and shapes are collected that compose artificial urban trash, debris and waste. The refraction of light destabilizes ones look and at the same time gives these sculptures an ever-changing face. It is a "geological sculpture", associated with soil, decay, disorder and entropy.
The title of Botsari's exhibition suggests that littleness and fragmentation are at the heart of her quest. The sculptural construction of the same title refers to the outdoor billboards that we find on Greek streets, on national and provincial roads. Abandoned scaffolding, these "modern menhirs" as the artist calls them, are the personification of "ruins in reverse", symbols of an inverted world. With references to Ed Ruscha and Robert Smithson, who adopted urban wandering as a tool in their work, Botsari presents a section of works focusing on the insignificant, the usefulness of the useless and the seemingly unnecessary. At the same time, her sculpture encourages the questioning of surrendered values and contributes to a better understanding of concepts such as deregulation and displacement.
Text by Christoforos Marinos
