Athens Insider: Artist Stella Kapezanou’s NY exhibition champions female power
Greek Artist Stella Kapezanou’s NY exhibition champions female power
Greek artist and 2024 Fulbright Fellow Stella Kapezanou universally recognised figurative paintings bring together the banal and the exotic as commentary on the western consumer dream and materialist culture. She joins forces with New Mexico based multidisciplinary artist Kate Turner at the non-profit cultural venue Opening Gallery in Tribeca in New York around shared themes of female power and earth rituals, and the beauty and dangers in the natural and human-made world.
Stella Kapezanou (Fulbright Fellow in Greece) and Kate Turner (Roswell Artist-in-Residence and named as one of “12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now” by Southwest Contemporary)—come together at Opening Gallery around shared themes of feminine power.
The artists converged in New Mexico as a result of a curatorial hunch initiated by Santa Fe based curator Tressa Berman. Having met Turner at her 12 Artists To Know exhibition at 516 Gallery in Albuquerque, their correspondence led to conversations about fabrication, fashion and bondage (sexual, social and aesthetic), and the conceptual turn to installation works that, on second glance, unveil masked meanings of power relations (interpersonal, historical, racial).
When she later encountered Kapezanou’s vibrant paintings organized around the theme of female sovereignty at the Santa Fe Art Institute, the iconographies somehow spoke across cultural differences. Upon meeting, the two artists lit the studio ablaze with their synergy, captured now melding into one another’s work, in sisterhood and recognition of the wound. Both artists draw from universal cultural symbols, mindful of specificity of meanings that define history and place, while at the same time delving into deeper structures of visual language where mythological and psychological metaphors traverse social maps of connectivity.
As in Kapezanou’s Here Be Dragons, unknown cartographies are marked by demons and dragons, harkening to dark ages of fearful and violent encounters in the real and imagined maps of exploration and colonization of body, place and mind. At the same time, there is beauty. Recurring elements join the two artists in a dance of divine feminine power that defies monumental tomes of brutality—slavery, warfare, patriarchy—to the generalized dangers wrought by Mother Nature herself, especially the dual forces of fire as creator and destroyer.
Kapezanou’s Corn Maidens and Turner’s Showing Out for the Conflagration ground the symbolic elements of the show, while crows, black cats, dragons and cloaked human forms lurk among the stalks and surprise us with life-affirming vibrancy and voluptuousness. The title takes from several elements of the artists’ combined works: Corn, as life-giving, ceremonial seed, a place to hide, a maze of play. Birds, as symbols of Spirit, messengers and protectors, omens and the warding off of evil. Crop circles, concentric areas of cultivated elements—plants, rocks, shells, bone, earth—create a swirling geometry, like a labyrinth. In this way, the “conflagration” can ignite the scene in a sweeping flame as the artists join myths, mysteries and history in their creative exchange.
Greek artist Stella Kapezanou is a 2024 Fulbright Fellow in Greece at the Santa Fe Art Institute, and recipient of many awards, including the Clyde & Co Emerging Star Award (2017), the Cass Art Prize (2018), and the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (ADBK) Academic Exchange (2023).
Kate Turner is a New Mexico based multidisciplinary artist originally from Cincinnati Ohio. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and has held residencies at the Galveston Artists Residency and the Roswell Artist-In-Residency program.
Tressa Berman, Ph.D. is an independent curator, art writer and visiting research faculty at the University of New Mexico. Author of two books and more than 40 articles and catalogue essays, her recent publications, exhibitions and awards include for the Nevada Museum of Art, Pop Redux: Mel Ramos and Friends, Escalante Gallery Los Angeles, and the 2022 Judy Chicago Feminist Art Education Award.
About The Opening Art Initiative
Exhibitions include visual and performing arts and music events, with monthly public programs spanning a wide range of topics. The Opening Gallery has presented international and US based artists including Andres Serrano, Sagarika Sundaram, Michele Zalopany, Kenneth Goldsmith, John Zorn, The Shoplifter, Luciano Chessa, Daniel Firman, Hans Weigand, Raúl Cordero, Jessica Mitrani, United Nations artist-observer Yann Toma, Warren Neidich, Coleman Collins, Constance DeJong, Charles Gaines, Jimmie Durham, Leslie Hewitt, Jimmy Raskin, Agnieszka Kurant, Olu Oguibe, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Chrysanne Stathacos, Leah Singer, Ronan Day-Lewis, Orit Ben Shitrit, and Bill Hayward. In spring 2024 the gallery program will present a selection of Watermill Center former artists-in-residence including Eileen O’ Kane Kornreich, Christopher Knowles with Sylvia Netzer, D. Graham Burnett and “The Order of the Third Bird,” and Brian Block.
The Gallery has hosted the New York Arab Festival and events organized by MoMA curators and collaborates withSorbonne Art Gallery in Paris. The nonprofit cultural venue and initiative supports an heteroclite art ecosystem that attempts to go beyond prevalent gallery models in Tribeca. Proceeds support neurodiversity, charitable causes, and the non-profit Luv Michael, which is committed to enriching the lives of autistic adults.
The Opening was founded by Sozita Goudouna, PhD and in 2023 partnered with the London-based publisher Eris to present exhibitions related to publications by Kenneth Goldsmith, Andres Serrano, ORLAN, Lucas Samaras, and Maurice Saatchi among other acclaimed contributors and artists. Our publishing art program has hosted readings of Edward Said’s poems by Simon Critchley, Stathis Gourgouris, and Udi Aloni, as well as readings of Gabriele Tinti by Vincent Piazza.
Corn Maidens: Crop Circles, Fire and a Conflagration of Birds
Artists: Stella Kapezanou and Katelyn Turner
Curator: Tressa Berman, Ph.D.
Organizer: GreeceInUSA.com and the Greek Ministry of Culture
The Opening Gallery, 42 Walker Street, New York
Opening Reception: Friday, March 29, 2024
