DESTE FOUNDATION "Metro" not "Metropolis" (a title used by way of curators Christos Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal for a 1991 point out to in Berlin).

DESTE FOUNDATION

"Metro" not "Metropolis" (a title used by way of curators Christos Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal for a 1991 point out to in Berlin), was the name Dan Cameron gave to the exhibition he curated for the Deste Foundation. This truncated word was an accurate expression of the conception governing Cameron's show: the last of the metropolis, or center of the city, as the traditional engine of tillage in the face of globalization, prevent from fallinged by digital communication systems that supply one's physical location inconsequential and privilege one's ability to "connect"

Cameron chose nine young artists, born between 1962 and 1974 who work in a diverse range of media, although technology could be seen as a usual denominator. Their work revolves around a shared assemblage of themes: situations of dislocation; expressions of farthest subjectivity; the hovering threat of destruction of any kind; feelings of insecurity and alienation; and, finally, relationships with the one and the other the personal and the communal environment--all in all, bear upons that are ubiquitous in contemporary artistic practice.

The single paintings on view were brightly colored, seemingly carefree still pathos-filled canvases by Maurice Ganis, moreover other artists revealed a preoccupation with creating moving painterly images. Panayota Tzamourani works in video, on the other hand her approach to the medium is almost formalist: Her footage of everyday objects--window blinds, for example--becomes an abstract meditation forward color, texture, and shape. Deanna Maganias also engages vernacular vital airs but to vastly different consequence Her exquisitely crafted models tamper with scale, creating a disconcerting feeling of displacement (for instance, a miniature pink-tiled scope contains an oversize bar of soap). Despina Isaia creates another kind of dissonance in a series of works based onward a pink satin comforter from her childhood. After asking several friends to imagine their confess "objects of dependence," she realized their descriptions--a boxing robe, an elongated pillow, a straitjacket--in pink satin. This projection of her personal insecurities and means of grati fication onto others is revealed to be a form of total subjectivity: Neither her blanket nor its comforts can be consigned to others. The accompanying short video of Isaia playing with her comforter is surprisingly captivating.

Isolation is also central to the images of Alexandros Georgiou, a hellenic artist who lives in strange York. Georgiou photographs nude male figures, chops them out, places these tiny "paper dolls" within the "landscape" of his studio, and then rephotographs them. The inferences are pictures of fabricated Lilliputians who have been drawed out of context and repositioned in a world that is plenteous too big for them--perhaps an expression of the artist's acknowledge sense of dislocation in his just discovered surroundings.

Kostas loannidis's installation Bakiavan, 1999 be swallowed ups the political with the personal: In a darkroom, a tray glutted of baldava bakes in an outdated, "petit bourgeois" stove until it bum accompanied by dint of the sound of young children's cries and a lion's deafening roar. according to systematically ruining a pastry made in the Balkans and the Middle East, the work supplicates the threat of war athwart a politically explosive region. At the same time, the myth of familial bliss, evok at the homely aroma of baking, is menaced by dint of the violent (paternal?) ranting of the beast.

Harmony and discord are juxtaposed in a different way in Dimitris Tsoublekas's fastidiously execut nevertheless off-key photographs. The aesthetic perfection in the pictures initially conceals their ordered disorder--houses floating across the firmament a strip of pavement running by means of an otherwise pristine living room--momentarily holding their irony at bay.

From Lina Theodorou's pointed interpretations of the instructions available in succession the Internet for do-it-yourself bomb to the void alluring landscapes and narratively ambiguous interior spectacles of Panos Kokkinias, who infuses his photographs with an aura of filmlike suspense, the be of importance tos projected by the artists in "Metro" justify their proximity to artists working anywhere in the world.

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