Panos Dimitropolos, Weast .01, installation

Greek, b. 1975, playing from Shanghai, China

I am Magritte’s mutated offspring, a semiotic side-effect of Surrealism. I bring together objects that are not meant to be, in a way that is not meant to be. Instead of painting a pipe, I use an actual pipe and claim it not to be one. My primary concern is the conceptual; the physical is treated as secondary, lightweight, unpretentious or dematerialized. The reality of the objects - displaced from their original surroundings and functions - end up highlighting the ideas they connote; they come from the world of things to express and communicate the world of ideas.

The abundance of commodities and objects as well as the state of being that art has entered have created the circumstances for a self-sustained conceptual art where objects, upgraded from their mere commodity status, become the palette. Contemporary-ness is the subject matter. Semiotic play is the brush ...and a darker shade of causticism.

The mental associations of the objects that compose these installations enter into a signification play with each other as they endlessly strive for meaning domination. I throw them into a conceptual arena and you watch them fight each other. In the end, it is up to you, the audience, to launch them into a career of metaphor, off into the realm of your imagination.

Thoughts on the Telephone process

What I discovered was that it could never be just about the reading of the work and merely translating it. Through the process of recreation – a stance is being made, a side is being chosen on the meaning of the translated; in this case - which I saw as a juxtaposition of the old and new, the human and the machine, the analog and the digital, the linear and the multidimensional under the threat of proven incompatibility but also with a glimpse of hope for the path of symbiosis – the choice of medium itself creates a choice of side (my analog as opposed to that of my digital inspirational predecessor). Although I firmly believe the message is the same, the delivery of it is – consciously but also unavoidably – the opposite; and, for me, the gravity of that irrevocably replaced the gravity of the message itself .