YORGO ALEXOPOULOS
No Feeling Is Final
Thursday, February 17, 6:00-9:30 pm
Openhouse Gallery
201 Mulberry Street, NYC
(Between Kenmare St. and Spring St.)
Yorgo Alexopoulos is a New York-based artist best known for his innovative use of new media and technology. His artistic approach is informed by techniques fine-tuned as a visual effects animator in the motion graphics industry. Alexopoulos' artworks often touch upon transcendental themes. No Feeling is Final is an animated aesthetic journey exploring elements of nature including mountains, forests, rain, deserts and entropy, and was first premiered at the Torrance Museum of Art, Torrance CA, in the fall of 2010.
Too see video documentaion, click here
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Created for projection or flat screens, No Feeling is Final is a synchronized composite of two horizontally aligned high-definition video frames with a continuous looping duration of ten minutes. An animated grid of digitally manipulated paintings, photographs and graphics move across the screen. An abstract narrative unfolds, composed of archetypal images and symbolic shapes.
Our individual and collective connection to things larger than ourselves is the inspiration for this visual and audio orchestration. The enveloping experience invokes commonly held ideas and questions regarding ineffability and subjectivity as they relate to our understanding of nature and the universe. Intermixed with landscape images are the simple Euclidean geometries (circle, square, triangle) that have helped philosophers, artists, and scientists interpret and represent the complexities of the universe. A mountain becomes a triangle, and the moon a perfect circle.
The metaphoric "characters" in this animistic drama stride across the stage, assembling loosely as a collage of abstract shapes and their earthly counterparts, therein revealing the basic forms that we use to perceive the world. This places the supposed purity of nature against our projected emotions of its representation.
For example, the desert often symbolizes vast emptiness or the negation of landscape. From one point of view it is a place to retreat and find divine revelation. On the other hand, it is a symbol of spiritual sterility. In contrast, a garden is a place where nature is tamed and its beauty cultivated. As a symbol of perfection and ordered beauty, the garden is often an enclosed escape from ominous wilderness where death, disorder, and violence can lurk. Because nature is subdued and controlled in a garden, it is often taken to represent the conscious mind as opposed to the forest, which stands for the dark, tangled, rooted growth of the unconscious.
The pulsating matrix of No Feeling is Final organizes its visuals like a map; forming a topographical world with latitude and longitude lines unrelated to the actual proportions of the Sphere. Each square is a world within itself. All together they support each other collectively. In our fractal reality perfect shapes fit together like pieces of a puzzle, whereas in No Feeling Is Final, they fade into each other and share the same space, as if it were some other place where both the "real" and the constructs of our imagination co-exist peacefully.
Yorgo Alexopoulos, 2010