Eugenia Raskopoulos, Vestiges #1, 2010-2014, digital pigment print on archival paper, 142x105cm.
EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS
Vestiges
13 May – 14 June 2014
ARC ONE Gallery is excited to present Eugenia Raskopoulos’ photographic series, Vestiges, from which she won the 2012 Josephine Ulrich & Win Schubert Photography Award with the work Vestiges #3.
In Vestiges, Raskopoulos has photographed carefully kept pieces of material and wrapping – plastic, paper and fabric – used to wrap gifts given to her over her years of birthday celebrations from 2010 to 2014. The series of twelve archival digital prints illustrates a ritualistic and physical connection between giver and receiver, as well as a sense of emptiness; of roles played out, of things been and gone. Anneke Jaspers, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, refers to the photographs as records of ‘soft violence’ - ‘an act of destruction that is inflected by tenderness’ while Raskopoulos unwraps her gifts. Within these images, we are left with a strange yet familiar vessel, imprinted with Raskopoulos’ touch and testament to a moment past. In its capture, each piece of decorative refuse becomes an object that hangs in a state of temporal logic.
Raskopoulos has exhibited in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally including, Read your Lips, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (2013); footnotes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2012); Words Are Not Hard – Intrude 366, Project Zendai MoMA, China (2008), and Writing Towards Disappearance, at ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne (2009).
Raskopoulos has also participated in various group exhibitions such as Image Anxiety/Ansiedad Visual, PhotoEspana, Spain (2012); Light Works, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2012); Group Exhibition, William Wright Artist Projects Space, Sydney (2011); How We Know that the Dead Return, Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne (2010); Mirror Mirror Then and Now, Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide (2010) and Video Logic, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2008). In 2007, Raskopoulos’ work was shown in Nightcomers at the 10th International Istanbul Biennale.
In 2012 Raskopoulos was awarded the Josephine Ulrich & Win Schubert Photography Award for her work, Vestiges #3. In 2010 and 2009 Raskopoulos was a finalist for the Albury City National Photography Prize and the Redlands Westpac Prize respectively. In 2006 she received a MoMA scholarship for The Feminist Future conference from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Raskopoulos has also been the recipient of a number of grants from the Australia Council.
Raskopoulos’ work is in Australian and international collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Queensland Art Gallery; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Artbank Collection; Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Greece; Polaroid Corporation Australia; Bodo University, Norway; Malmo University, Sweden; Gold Coast City Art Gallery, QLD; Groningen Hochschule University, Netherlands. Raskopoulos’ works are also held in private collections in Australia, Greece, China, Switzerland and the USA.
For all enquiries contact Annabel Holt at mail@arc1gallery.com