Leah Koutroumanos is a visual artist working in painting, drawing, and instillation. She utilizes mimetic rendering in order to translate the ephemeral ‘affect’ of objects and environments. Studying from life, her watercolours and oil paintings explore themes of mundanity, timelessness, and domesticity. Her subjects include residual objects, atmospheric space, heirlooms, and elements of the studio. Using poetic and data driven methodologies, she is looking to translate and relay the emotional response to everyday experiences.
Research Proposal
Through mimetic rendering, instillation, and writing, I am looking to interpret and record affect. This is possible by actively searching for tangible incidental moments. I feel the act of cataloguing and rendering the image of residual objects, honours them and our perception in that moment. This acts to resist a previously established sense of insignificance. Through painting, I am anatomizing an object’s form, establishing a dialogue and a deeper emotional connection. Using scientific styled investigative technique, I am aiming to systematically develop a taxonomy of the lived moment. This analysis of objects and moments is only possible through the employment of rigorous, experiential observation that I will refer to as ‘hyper-practice.’ This is to be constantly available and susceptible to affect. The act of imbedding this emotional response changes our relationship with ‘objective’ methods of categorizing and the subsequent transliteration of visual information.
I am exploring different methods of recording data and presenting it. These translations allow for a deeper understanding of form and the embodied essence of the object or moment. I am attempting to relay affect and a sense of ephemerality. This is effectively done through series work, as the repeating of forms emphasises their nuanced differences. As well, through watercolour and oil painting, I am able to give these subjects space to breath. This compositional decision brings up themes of care, time, and labour.
I feel these documentative, meditative, and ritualistic acts of record would be contextualized by both the gallery space and artist book.
I am questioning my own relationship to art practice, site specificity, the canon of painting, and our cultural relationship to ‘things.’ For the process of choosing subjects and filtering perception, I am researching thing theory, condensed matter physics, and impressionist painting. For the process of visually understanding, I am researching optics and colour theory. I plan to continue recording information through mimetic rendering and exploring methods of collecting data. A key element of embracing hyper-practice is to be present and involved in my environment. For this reason, I am beging a practice of loosely poetic note keeping and rapid paint sketches in order to record more elusive experiences.