What can we make of self-portraits in odd places that juxtapose ironic vignettes mocking our contemporary urban lives with everyday chores and mundane routines? In this series of new works, Becharkis, a native of Athens, Greece who studied at New York University, sheds light on our complicated lives and shows us our current environment in which we are constantly bombarded with images.
Whether in a grocery store, the airport, the subway or on a Manhattan street, the artist’s portraits remind us of women’s work and that ever-tenuous balance between one’s private and public life. Always seeking out and representing duality, Becharkis offers composed theatrical performances using a documentary style of photography that investigates the spaces between autobiography and fiction, performance and reality, perhaps reflecting her own national bifurcation between Greece and New York.
Becharkis’s photography is a culmination of multiple techniques influenced by cinema. The long, narrow format is elongated to capture the duality of combined images. She creates fantastical sentences, stringing the viewer along with multiple ironies, and a tantalizing sense of humor emerges as the scenes become even more real. Fascinated with the artist becoming herself an art object, she stages various events that normally don’t occur within public/private locales, prompting the viewer to ask, “Is this true or false?” The merging of images such as a portrait of the artist sitting in her living room, fruit in hand, (as though she needs to make a selection between apples and oranges) contrasts with an image from a local grocery store that highlights the orderliness of a mundane minimalist display of stacked fruit in the store’s aisles.
Other images include the artist in a bathing suit, lounging with a drink in hand in an empty parking lot covered in snow. She is surrounded by two advertisements of famous people toasting with Skyy vodka. All three are holding cocktail glasses, totally unaware of their surroundings. It’s almost as if she was reporting the weather for the evening news, live from her lounge chair: “today’s weather, it is snowing out.” Some of the most contemplative images are from a series of portraits where she portrays herself doing everyday household chores, taking a bubble bath or washing the floor, contrasted with shots of an anonymous subway platform. With these, she creates unusual ambiguities of the kind that resonate throughout New York City.
Airports and subways stations, although basic transportation hubs for any major city, can also be scary, daunting locations in which normal routines can be irrevocably altered. Anxiety surrounding robberies and terrorist attacks can permeate these dark and gloomy sites. Becharkis’ images draw attention to how one navigates through such an urban terrain, alluding sometimes in obvious ways to these potential crimes, while at other times subtly allowing the viewer to reconsider what public space is.
In a typical arrangement, Becharkis combines three frames that merge into a panoramic overview, overtly toying with the viewer’s perception and gaze. Whether artificial or natural environments, she sometimes shoots through various glasses creating reflections that cause us to speculate on who the spectator is: the viewer, the setting, or the artist?
Holly Block is the executive director of Art in General, a leading nonprofit arts organization located in New York City. She has been the curator and organizer of numerous contemporary art exhibitions and projects and is the author and editor of ART CUBA: The New Generation (2001), a book on contemporary art from Cuba published by Harry N. Abrams.