Anthemoessa

This kinetic installation was inspired by the myth of the Sirens; its title  – Anthemoessa – is the name of the island where these chthonian creatures lived. In book 12 of the Odyssey, the witch Circe gives the island a haunting description. A meadow with ‘’a great heap of bones of mouldering men, and round the bones the skin is shrivelling’’ (Murray translation).
Pavlina’s fascination with the Sirens came with the first lockdowns. She wanted to create a symbolic artwork that would make the viewer contemplate the deeper meaning of the Siren entrapment beyond the simplistic links to femininity, sexuality and temptation. Perhaps the myth reveals something we have all fallen into; the superficial comfort, convenience or safety of being in “good hands”. Surrendering to others our capacity to think for ourselves and ultimately giving up our self-sovereignty.

Art historian and curator Dr Elizabeth Plessa says the following about the work:
“Mirrors, positioned at right angles, form a seemingly nonphysical curtain since it absorbs the surrounding reflections.”
“…these mirrors create perpetual binary pairs of real and idol, confounding the actual and virtual limits, simultaneously alluding to the dual nature of the winged Sirens. The familiar image of our own reality, through its reflection, is questioned and transformed into the eerie reality of the artwork.”
On the leather floor symbolizing the gruesome island, she adds:
“Like a pixelated image, decomposed into its constituent pixels, this meadow of death becomes painterly joy, a fugue of colour planes that become autonomous and prevail, in an artwork which Vagioni envisages  as a theatrical stage that is concluded with the involvement of the viewer, in a path of loss or acknowledgement of the self.”

Medium: Leather, galvanized sheet metal, plywood, MDF board, acrylic mirror, motors, cables, 3D printed ABS filament, oil, oil pastel, encaustic wax.

Dimensions: 200 x 213 x 142 cm (83.86 x 78.74 x 55.91 inches)