Mourning Dress Installation

Chryssafenia is a multi-local artist, curator and art historian who spends her time in the U.S., Greece, and Ecuador. She works in 2D, 3D, collage, installation and performance, joining artist collectivas and often collaborating with authors, fashion designers, fiber artists, weavers, farmers, revolutionaries, musicians and dancers. Her themes include ethnic cross-dressing, alchemy (its tradition of inscrutability as well as its amaranthine transformative potency ), performativity, shamanism, interstice, the disabled body as protest, muse and provocateur, semiotics, hybrid vs mongrel queries, sad girl theory as well as sacred and profane stories, old and new, public and arcane. The Quotidian Mysteries of the 21st century. Her current work explores magical symbols, hierophanies, and how pain mitigates or intensifies these experiences. Ultimately, exploring and trying to find what inhabits the cusp. Fashion's function in art informs the work as well; how it navigates, explores and explosively disrupts the status quo. Personal dramaturgy performed via sartorialism as crypto-vernacular is examined in autobiographical modes. A most rewarding and notable collaboration involved being invited into the role of curator, by Mirto Fifa in the region of Mani in southern Greece,where a floating art exhibit Re:Think, tackled eco-destruction through the illegal dumping in the region of Maratholaka. The show revealed, protested and asked questions involving Greece's future in regard to out of pocket pollution.