Chrysanne Stathacos
Cooking with Roses

Chrysanne Stathacos: Cooking with Roses is a survey of the acclaimed, Buffalo-born artist’s work with the eponymous flower. This exhibition is the first of three in BICA’s 2022-23 exhibition series: Recovering Futures.

Throughout Chrysanne Stathacos’s long career several materials, or in her words, “witchy items,” have been deployed again and again: ivy, hair, condoms, and roses. Cooking with Roses surveys Stathacos’ prints, paintings, installations, and objects that utilize the flower in a variety of unexpected ways: arranging its petals into sculptural mandalas, pressing it into the canvas (along with hair and condoms), and even printing images on individual petals; together, Stathacos’ rose work exemplifies her creativity and dedication to process-based innovations across many mediums.

In this series of works that dates from the 1980s to the present, Stathacos conjures an eco-holistic reading by investigating the spiritual properties and metaphors inherent in nature. For Stathacos, the rose and its remnants have immense metaphorical and metaphysical power: roses symbolize love and yearning. Her practice of pressing the roses onto linen and paper materially riffs on Jean Cocteau’s phrase “blood of a poet” as well as the works of Yves Klein, Anna Atkins, and The Shroud of Turin.

Throughout the 1990s Stathacos was deeply impacted by the AIDS crisis, losing many of her close friends including Robert Flack as well as Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal from the Canadian conceptual art collective, General Idea. “These traces are also my reflection of loss and are connected to my experiences of losing friends to the ongoing AIDS pandemic. The crisis had a profound effect on my work, resulting in the use of direct impressions of roses, ivy, and condoms,” Stathacos said about the development of her unique techniques.

It is notable that Stathacos’ exhibition will open in the middle of a Mercury Retrograde and is a return for the artist, both symbolic and literal. In her early teens she took welding lessons from sculptor Larry W. Griffis, Jr. in the metal studio that shares a wall with BICA’s gallery, and in 1978 Stathacos had one of her first exhibitions, Summerspace, at the original Hallwalls location at 30 Essex Street, followed the next year by an exhibition she curated there of artists associated with A Space in Toronto.

Along with the exhibition, Stathacos will give an artist talk on September 24 at Noon in the gallery at BICA and will work with participants of BICA School in a critique, leading a reading group, and the presentation of a workshop. This exhibition will be accompanied by a newly commissioned essay on the artist’s work.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Chrysanne Stathacos is a multidisciplinary artist of Greek, American, and Canadian origin. Her work has encompassed printmaking, textile, painting, installation, and conceptual art. Stathacos is heavily involved with and influenced by feminism, Greek Mythology, eastern spirituality, and Tibetan Buddhism, all of which inform her current artistic practice. She is currently based in Athens and Toronto and represented by The Breeder (Athens).

Stathacos has presented projects in museums, galleries, and venues internationally. She has recently participated in exhibitions at Museo d’Arte Orientale (Turin), Henie Onstad Art Centre (Oslo), Cooper Cole (Toronto), SITUATIONS Gallery (New York), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Berlin), and the 13th Gwangju Biennial (South Korea). Stathacos was also featured as a contributor to AA Bronson’s House of Shame, published by Edition Patrick Frey (Zürich).

Amidst the AIDS crisis in the 1990s, Stathacos’ work became deeply engaged with body politics, and her commentary on issues of sexuality and gender became more pronounced. Through her work, Stathacos was creating images and experiences that connect issues of body, environment, and future. Her works from that time represent this pivotal moment in the artist’s practice.

Stathacos is known for her support of women artists in her collaborative exhibitions, writing, and social practice. Two major collaborative works from the early 1990s still resonate today: The Abortion Project with Kathe Burkhart, and The Banquet with Hunter Reynolds, (1959-2022). The Abortion Project commemorated women’s reproductive rights and was presented at Artists Space, Simon Watson Gallery, Real Art Ways, Hallwalls, and New Langton Arts between 1991 and 1993. The Banquet was first performed at Thread Waxing Space in 1992, inspired by Surrealist Meret Oppenheim’s Spring Feast. On May 1, 2017, Participant Inc. celebrated The Banquet’s 25h Anniversary as part of Ephemera Office Enterprise. She is a founding Director of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Initiatives, (dgli.org) a non- profit organization that works to help Tibetan Buddhist women practitioners in the Himalayas.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION SERIES

From September 2022 through June 2023 the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art will present Recovering Futures, a series of three exhibitions by artists Chrysanne Stathacos, TJ Shin, and Sofía Córdova. The exhibitions will be accompanied by essays and a year-long, artist-led course in a new, free art school. The exhibition series consists of three solo presentations of work by artists exploring memory, transformation, and recovery in a damaged world.

Recovering Futures is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support for the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.