An Art Book - Theogony
FREE - Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
Marking the publication of Theogony, the influential artist Lydia Venieri, art historian Anastasia Aukeman and writer and reporter Michael Skafidas discuss the book and the work of this prolific artist. Venieri's most recent video art project The Dolphin Conspiracy will also be screened.
Lydia Venieri erects entire mythologies and symbolic systems from the already phantasmagoric world of news media. Her stories are played out using dolls and childlike imagery to counter media dementia, in painting, drawing, photography, video and the internet. Theogony explicates Venieri's universe surveying two decades of work.
Copies of Lydia Venieri: Theogony are available for purchase and signing at the event.
Lydia Venieri, "The Dolphin Conspiracy - The Last Supper," 2009, satin photograph, 96x48 inches
Lydia Venieri, "Planetic Exodus - Border Check," 2010, satin photograph, 40x20 inches
Lydia Venieri (born January 27,1964 in Athens, Greece) is a multi-media artist whose work ranges from sculpture to installations incorporating painting, photography, video, the Internet and even the iPhone. Her work is inspired by everyday mythology and symbolism, and is presented in units with titles such as Platonic Big Bang, Telluric Manifesto, Anima Mundis, Planet Exodus, The Last Conflict. “I create universes and landscapes where I project stories, conspiracy theories related to the media and mythological legends.” In 2000 she was awarded the Academie Francaise Medal for Sculpture. She studied at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, in Paris. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide including the George Pompidou Center, Manifesta Rotterdam, Circulo de Bellas Artes Madrid, Gallery Asbaek Copenhagen, Cultural Centre of Stockholm, National Gallery of Greece, Athens Olympics 2004, Ancien Musee Archeologique Municipalite de Thessalonique, Centre for Contemporary Art in Dordrecht Netherlands, New York Public Library, and Art in General. Since 1997 Venieri has been based in New York where she has created her trilogy: Hibernation, Forever After and The Dolphin Conspiracy a sculpture installation and video series. Her latest photo series, War Games and See No Evil have toured in the US, Europe and Asia. Venieri is often commissioned to create set designs for theaters in the US and Europe. She is represented by Stux Gallery in New York and Gallery Terra Tokyo. Her retrospective exhibition The Last Conflict: Sculpture, Video and Photography opens at Stux Gallery on May 19 and will be on view through June 25.
Anastasia Aukeman is an art historian and curator living and working in New York City. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. The recipient of the Newhall Fellowship in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (2007-2008), she holds an M.Phil. degree in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University New York and specializes in photography as well as modern and contemporary art. She has published numerous articles and reviews in Art in America, Art on Paper, and Artnews magazines, as well as exhibition catalogue essays and encyclopedias. Her most recent scholarship is a consideration of the profound influence of assemblage and the California avant-garde of the 1950s and '60s on later twentieth-century art movements.
Michael Skafidas is a writer and a professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York. His most recent academic essay “Fabricating Greekness: from Fustanella to the Glossy Page” appeared in the book The Fabric of Cultures (Routledge, 2009). He is a contributing editor to Global Viewpoint of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and NPQ. His articles and interviews with world luminaries have appeared in various international print and electronic publications such as the Huffington Post, Die Welt, La Republica and El Pais. He is also an editor-at-large and columnist for the Greek edition of Marie Claire and Status magazine, the editor of the Greek Edition of NPQ and co-author with Nathan Gardels of Bright Minds at the Turn of the Century (Terzo Books, 2000).
In its second season the program series An Art Book, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world renowned and emerging artists, critics, curators, designers, historians and writers.