Yola Maria Tsolis

Nothing is permanent, and nothing remains the same. The greatest trials of human life are experienced through the most extreme forms of change, when we are confronted with the realization that existence is fundamentally temporary and our lives finite, framed on either side by birth and death. At the same time, an attentiveness to the world’s mutability requires an active gaze, one that is capable of recognizing the old within the new, and the familiar as something other.

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In Buddhist teaching, existential impermanence is a fundamental characteristic of human existence. The concept of Dukkha, which constitutes the first of the Four Noble Truths, articulates an awareness of life’s transience and the suffering humans inflict upon themselves in their attempts to resist change -through, for example, excessive generalization, attachment, or desire. In any given situation, our attention is always directed toward something. What we see, and what we do, is conditioned by our historical positioning. Yet disruptions of expectation can alter our perceptual patterns and unsettle us from habitual modes of thought.

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In the exhibition Dukkha, Yola Maria Tsolis presents a series of works that challenge our accustomed and often passive ways of viewing our surroundings. The motifs depict seemingly everyday and ordinary views from the Peloponnese, a Greek coastal landscape dominated by generic architecture and untamed nature. More subtly, the landscape is anchored in mythological narratives, often tied to specific natural phenomena that have left lasting traces in place names, cultural traditions, and collective memory. The photographs are printed on textile and subsequently shaped using a tessellation technique, in which points are stitched together and folded according to geometric principles. Certain details are thereby brought to the fore, while others remain concealed within the folds. In the interplay between the systematic and the contingent, between the ordered logic of geometry and the sensuous, unruly qualities of textile, Tsolis develops a distinctive visual language that plays with perception’s capacity to form meaningful connections between visual fragments and a broader horizon of understanding.

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The works also explore art’s privileged dual position -on the one hand as a bearer of traditional visual languages, and on the other as a site for experimental expression. The motifs include a road sign being consumed by vegetation; a functional water tank on the roof of a building; glimpses of a mountain range behind a sea of rooftops and television antennas. These atypical photographic framings possess an immediate visual appeal while simultaneously ironizing our desire for aestheticizing tropes used to impose form, meaning, and value upon our immediate surroundings. Through abstraction and rupture, the works challenge our habitual cognitive patterns and our continually shifting perspective on the world by reactivating the gaze. With heightened attentiveness to the world’s richness of detail and diversity of variation, we may begin to perceive what lies beneath the surface -where traces of history and resilience persist even within the most seemingly trivial landscapes.