petdemonium

An art event @ The Creatures Pet Shop & Grooming 🐕 🐕 🦮 🦮

Concept and curated by Naira Stergiou & Eriphyli Veneri

Sunday the 19th December 2021, 18.00 p.m. - 22.00 p.m.

Mesogeion Ave. 176, 15561 Cholargos Athens

🐕 🐕 🦮 🦮

Actaeon was a formidable hunter who had 50 greyhounds. One day Actaeon bent down to drink water with his dogs at a spring of Mount Kithairon. But goddess Artemis was bathing at the spot and he inadvertently saw her naked. The goddess got angry and transformed him into a deer, while ordering the dogs to devour him. When the animals recovered from the divine blindness-intoxication, they desperately sought their master, until the gods took pity on them and created a replica of Actaeon so that they could see him, as consolation.

In the Pantheon of "The Creatures", the cult of the bestial and the miscellaneous is celebrated. Beings of a mixed nature, motley, heterogeneous, horribly beautiful entities. On December 19th the road will be open and the dogs will be tied up. The only sure thing, none of them will be neglected: all be groomed and perfumed as teratOMORFA (beautybeasty).

Participating artists:

GENERAL VIEW PHOTOS:

THE ARTWORKS:

Spyros Aggelopoulos

Pokemon-Skiapod

wood, papier-mâché, straw, acrylic, 2021

The Skiapods were a tribe of one-legged Ethiopian men. With one leg but a huge one! When they wanted to lay into the shade, they would just raise their large foot against the sun. My Skiapod is in its Pokemon version.

Yannis Economides

Don't You Know How the Saying Goes?

video loop, 17‘‘, from the movie Stratos, 2014

Economides's cinematic world is steeped in physical and emotional violence, demonstrating the disintegration of Greek petty bourgeois society, its pathogenesis and its -often- brutalization. In the excerpt from the 2014 film Stratos, the phrase "Big fish eats little fish, you idiot" is heard in a non-stop, obsessive loop, highlighting the beauty of the almost natural daily bestiality.

Rebecca Giannopoulou

Harry Paparis

digital drawing print, balloons, 2021

Harry Paparis is my most important collaborator when I tattoo nipples after a mastectomy. If a woman is kind of afraid or feels insecure before we start, I ask her "Is everything alright? Shall we start? Should I bring Harry Paparis?". Being naked from the waist up, she always jumps looking around „What? Will a man come in here???". And I burst out laughing. The ice is broken. So Harry is a lama who wants to be a unicorn. He tries hard. He put on colorful wings, glitter… but he remains a lama. We are all lamas who want to become unicorns. Women with breast cancer have tried hard to be what they are not. For their partners, their children, their parents, their friends… And cancer came to show them that they had chosen a path that does not work in their favor. If we all just decide that we are lamas, we will have a much better time on our journey on Earth.

Periklis Pravitas

Odette

glass objects, plastic toy, polyester figure, water, 2021

The Odette composition consists of an assembly of glass objects in a vertical structure, on top of which Odette stands at the moment of her transformation. In the work, a continuous mixture of seemingly unrelated objects forms a paradoxical figure that stands in a small pool of water. It is a small-scaled monument for mixed nature. A monument that will be erected at the place where these mythical creatures lived...

Thalia Raftopoulou

Lead Thunder

lead, sound 22’, 2021

Enter the pet salon The Creatures from the urban fuss of Mesogeion avenue to bird songs and parrots “brouhaha”, a “sonic muddle” of the animals home that reigns and “magically transports me elsewhere. Α situation of rupture, where perceptive confusion gives way to an inexplicable aesthetic pleasure [...] an unexpected perception of beauty in the absence of any discernible order or arrangement” (Augoyard-Torgue). These were fragments of the entry of the semantic sonic effect Sharawadji, translated in Greek as “chaotic beautiful”. In the researchers’ analysis it is correlated with Kristeva’s linking abject with the sublime. The Sharawadji effect is approached in this installation by means of sculpture, and a conversation with my daughter about certain toys and animated hybrid creatures with multiple cores.

Naira Stergiou

Home Sweet Home: Gregor Samsa Had a Dream, Knock Knock the Door

mixed materials, 2021

Έχω ένα όνειρο, ένα σπιτικό

Που πολύ πολύ το αγαπώ.

Γυναίκα και πολλά παιδιά η κατσαριδοφαμιλιά.

Είναι το κατσαριδόσπιτό μου

Και είναι απόλυτα δικό μου

Είναι το μυστικό μου

Stay away / you are not welcome. lalala

+++++++tik tak tik tok+++alarm

Eriphyli Veneri

Afternoonified

copper sheets, enamel paint, 2021

„Afternoonified” is a Victorian high-society word meaning smart, elegant. It was in the early 19th century that dogs became integrated into family life as pets, becoming anthropomorphised: obtaining a name, getting cuddled, coiffed and beribboned. Books on pet care began to be published, pet food as well as pet medicaments (e.g. cough pills) began to be manufactured, pet cemeteries were created. At the same time, Victorian upper classes invented dog breeding: the remaking of varieties of dogs and the development of dog show competitions. On the other side of the “beauty show” coin, dogfightings were organized as lower-class entertainment, where the wild competition dogs were presented to the crowd for bettings before each fight.

Stathis-Alexandros Zoulias

Punk

ballpoint pen on paper, 2020

This work is part of a series of portraits that emerge through the details of rocky surfaces. The movement of the gaze senses the image of the rocky surface and selectively discovers forms and faces in which teratogenesis very often occurs. After all, there are countless beings that "dwell" visually in the details of the natural environment.