Artist Statement: Patricia Maurides
by Sophia Larigakis, writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York
Patricia Maurides’ photo-based work incorporates elements of performance, collage, sound art, and sculpture. Her densely layered images contain references to spontaneous actions in nature, historical objects, and other three-dimensional or time-based media. In her work, the notion of the artifact is extended beyond its traditional associations—ancient objects, displaced and preserved in glass cases—to encompass the everyday, the deeply personal, and the living. Leaves dilated under a microscope implicate prehistory in contemporary life, tree crevices and ambient sounds gleaned in an ancestral land become portals to other ways and times of being. Coins gathered from her late father’s home and images from family albums are rendered, in her photographs, crucial layers in the vaster work of assembling and embodying a history. Trained as a scientist, she sees art and science as twin tools for opening up the world, for “making sense of very small things.” Maurides builds her photographs like palimpsests, each layer obscuring and complicating the former, yet the pursuit of legibility drives much of her work. What is made visible here, paradoxically, is the fundamental illegibility of memory. Maurides’ surfaces, at once thick with histories and semi-translucent, as if underwater, model a way of seeing that holds as many elements as possible simultaneously, letting information seep through and stain the skin of the photograph.
Maurides, also an educator, foregrounds questions of access and collaboration in every aspect of her work. Grounded in an indefatigable curiosity, her practice evinces a voracious relationship with experience and knowledge of all kinds. Hyperaware of place (her recently adopted home of Long Island, and her family’s origins on remote Greek mountain villages and isles are primary in her current practice) the artist often employs her own body in the work of image-making. Touching, living with, and learning from the objects and figures she depicts, Maurides leaves traces of her own presence—her shadow, scans of her eyes—in her images as evidence of having been there, relics of haptic experience. Here, strata of images, projections, and other artifacts lend the work both a narrative weight and a dynamism: a cinematic quality. But rather than twenty-four successive stills a minute coalescing into gesture, as in film, Maurides’ images condense cinematic time and movement into a single, loaded frame.