24.6-15.7.2010

Aegean Sea Odes, Mary Schina

Performance 24.6.2010, at 21:00

As a part of the exhibition of the engraver Mary Schina, Emily Bouriti presents her performance expressing with movement, the mystic world of the undersea.
Emily Bouriti notes on her performance:
"The body stands upon underground space, feeling its vibration, and thus reacts. The body's movement is clings at times to the ground and other times within the air, generating organic forms"

The exhibition

With her large-scale installation “Aegean Sea Odes” that stretches in the main gallery space, Mary Schina attempts to render the boundlessness of the undersea space, its luminous depth, the animated stillness of the ancestral sea created by the sunlight’s refractions and dispersions and the charm of the continuously changing underwater world of colors, its transparency, form, calm intensity and mysticism.

Mary Schina’s’ source of inspiration has been the sea of the “Small Cyclades”, the island complex of Amorgos, Keros, Koufonissia, Herakleia and Schoinousa, which hold in their bosom a sea where the sunlight with its alterations reveals an underwater world of colors in endless interchanges and transformations. The light is there truly the creator of another, secret and profound world.

That is why one would hardly imagine that Mary Schina’s ethereal silk banners, with their countless color transformations of blue water, begin with a Woodcut. That is her secret. For her installation Schina takes the wood, carves her design along its grains and fibers, tames the hard surfaces and uses the soft ones, sets alternatively the colors on the roller, and prints her woodcuts from her etching press. Throughout her works there is clarity and color purity. The colors though assert also the transparency they receive from the light- the source of all colors: the absolute and transcendental Greek light.

Schina photo-transferred these images in order to print them digitally on raw white silk of exquisite quality and transparency, brought especially from China.

Download text by Irene Orati