Surfacing – Realities (Αναδύσεις- Πραγματικότητες)

medusa gallery
εγκατάσταση 2005












Dr. Lina Tsikouta-Deimezis
Art Historian
Curator at the National Gallery





[1] Kiki Dimoula, “Associated Spring Moods”, from the collection “One Moment Together”, Ikaros Editions, Athens 1998.

MARIGO KASSI
Memory in the course of existence and the awareness of time



      The artists I admire and enjoy do not make great leaps, creating unbridgeable gaps in the course of their artistic creation. Their obsessions, which confine them to the profound investigation of their own anxieties, are arduous but creative and give them the possibility of refining and frequently exhausting their subject, out to the limits of their thought.

      Marigo Kassi goes out into space and creates a fascinating installation. Despite the fact that our encounter up to now has been with her painting, I once more feel the need to leaf through the catalogue from her solo exhibition three years ago and mention the title of my text taken from a verse by Kiki Dimoula ”Tonight temporarily cast all responsibility on the deceitful kiss sent, you by nostalgia.” [1] It is also relevant to the artist’s new investigation.
      Twice before Kassi has undertaken to create works in space, once in Thessaloniki at the Zina Athanasiadou Gallery, making small wire sculptures, and last year at Gallery 24 in the exhibition, “Playing with Time”, constructing a small wardrobe with little dresses and nostalgic music, along with her childhood pictures, thus playing a game with time.
      Now she has entered space dynamically. Working with apparent effortlessness, she makes use of the same subject matter, the same materials, and the same charged nostalgia and memory. The female creation, that whispers something intimate to other women. Her old motifs, the little dresses -- painted or real -- the shadows of the girls done with spray paint, the hand-made pieces of paper, the vaporous and simple, all refer to a “recollection of conditions” by means of objects. The fragmentary nature of the details of her painting compositions, the framing in matter and texture, have now entered space. Everything that she knows and so arduously depicts spurs her on “to do a great deal in space, for many women.”
      From the gallery’s ceiling depend numerous transparent rods in a variety of arrangements, from which hang paper dresses on small hangers. These little dresses are all different, with their own motifs, their own lacework, their bows and their special cutting, created from handmade paper, brought from England and America. Everything is handmade, everything unique, just like the female existences they represent. These white, black, grey, pink, and sea-blue creations presented together with the incorporation of two or three of her childhood photographs are simply overpowering.
      Approximately two hundred and fifty unique little dresses hang down, cleaned, purified, from the ceiling of that very special dry cleaner’s of memory, a direct reference to the uniqueness of female personalities. The size of the dresses is a reference to the women themselves, while the “emergence” of the image ends in a nostalgic “reality”, where memory in the course of existence and the awareness of time plays the leading role.