Konstantin
Dimopoulos - The Shower
Room
Until 8 October 2011 at the Conny Dietzschold
Gallery, Sydney - Australia
‘Transformation’ is the focus of
this new installation by Konstantin Dimopoulos. The black-and-white
Bergman-like images, seemingly crafted from some Nordic or Barbaric lands,
are transplanted effortlessly here in this Antipodean landscape. In
The Shower Room, Dimopoulos creates a series of modular
shower units, five in total. Each stand-alone work is 3 meters in height,
made of black steel, with a shower unit held on five stem pediments. The
dark spider-like legs, long and extended, splay outwards from the centre
of the shower, each leg sitting on castors that allow them to move freely.
Their mobility is a statement in itself, the portability of
ideas.
These industrial fittings originally designed for a
domestic setting are now transformed to some other purpose, some political
convenience. Conceived to cleanse the living, brutal pieces of the
ordinary, that transform the day-to-day bathroom shower to something more
malevolent. Statements of man’s creative imagination. These showers have a
similarity to the showers we know and use. And yet our memory tells us
that we have seen these images before within a different context. They
stand like black triffids in rows, waiting to be activated. Their long
necks curving down, with shards of white lines raining out from their
steel perforated shower heads towards the floor.
In the smaller gallery, we see another installation
The Bed–Sitting Room. To one side of the room sits a
black iron bed. Again the idea of transformation and memory is brought
into play. We have seen this room before but something has changed. The
bed seems strangely altered, stretched and emaciated. On the wall a
drawing of a family portrait from a wedding is slightly off-center,
tilted, so that you want to go up and straighten it. While on a shelf
metronome-like units keep time. The transformation and monotone nature of
these works, the black and white pastiche of colour within the gallery
suggest something more of a collective memory exploring the synapses of a
common consciousness.
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