"Between You and Me and the Wall"

Kyriaki Costa, Depth of Surface, 2011

In the exhibition "Between You and Me and the Wall" at Omikron Gallery, Nicosia, and which opened on Friday, January 21, Maria Stathi and Polys Peslikas invited ten local artists to intervene onto the gallery's walls to create work anew and one that is going to cease to exist when the exhibition ends in three weeks (22 Jan - 16 Feb). All ten artists engaged in an intimate process of re-inventing the white walls of the gallery, knowing that the final result will be ephemeral. Nonetheless, all invested time with precision in the production of an exhibition that is by definition contemporary.

While most of the artists 'drew' on the walls or marked the walls using various means, such as printed wallpaper, collage, pencil, charcoal etc, Kyriaki Costa chose to intervene onto the volume of the gallery space by hanging an actual/physical divide in the middle of the gallery (shown above). It is made of net on which she printed a found photograph that she manipulated digitally. The work changes the space by adding another wall, a barrier to an otherwise open plan, and thus a barrier to visitors' movements in the room. Although a solid boarder, its semi-transparency transforms the work into a metaphor for the relationships between gallery visitors. While all in the same room, seeing and often inspecting each other, their interaction is minimal (unless they know each other in which case they restrict movement and gather in groups around wine). Kyriaki Costa, with her “Depth of Surface”, is forcing the viewer to interact with others behind the safety of her 'curtain'. The shadows of people behind the constructed screen not only become part of the piece and the printed image of men ready to dive into the water, but also of the viewing experience.

The fact that Kyriaki used a specific technique so that the printed image on one side is not visible on the other creates a game of positive and negative space (shown below). The ready-to-jumb in the water, half-naked men, on the one side completely disappear on the other side, leaving behind only the artist’s stitches of the figures' black or dark grey hair and of the brunches of the trees above them. This double view of the work could stand also as a metaphor for the relationship between visitors and artworks: visitors look at artworks, but rarely force themselves to engage with what lies underneath the ‘surface’ of the obvious image. In this case, Kyriaki reveals the often ‘hidden’ other side of the work’s surface and the depth of its meaning. This act of complete abstraction from one side to the other, through stitching, creates an interesting opposition and even a paradox within the artwork's own structure that is uniquely inviting.