Eleanna Anagnos | Fever Logic

High Noon is pleased to present Fever Logic, the gallery’s second exhibition of work by Eleanna Anagnos. Anagnos has spent the better part of the past two years in Mexico City expanding her practice’s engagement with paper pulp, which she began using in 2017 to create work that bridges material, subject, and object as an investigation into themes of collective consciousness.

 

The show’s title alludes to the shared reordering of perception during the course of the pandemic, but directly refers to Anagnos’s haptic process of examining and rearranging endless possible solutions to compositional and material concerns. The industriousness of Anagnos’s practice has Modernist roots in the narrative qualities of Italy’s Arte Povera movement and its impetus to consider material’s relationship to the environment, implying a world outside itself. The sensuality explored in the material calls to mind Postminimalism’s embracing and elevation of craft such as in Lucy Lippard’s groundbreaking 1966 exhibition, Eccentric Abstraction.

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In addition to using amate, abaca, linen, and cotton fibers, the work also includes ceramic elements, stones, urethane, rubber, reclaimed newspaper, glass, holographic foil, and acrylic, oil, and vinyl paints. By pushing the limits of the pulp’s potential as a medium, she circumvents expectations related to all the materials used, setting up a deceptively slow read. The works in Fever Logic behave like objects or vessels that are active agents capable of containing and projecting worldviews and perceptions. As the body is its own vessel of fibrous connections, the scale and tactile nature plays with the viewer’s body and their relationship to the work, imparting a deeper connection through the legible physicality contained.

 

Paper is quotidian and recognizable, yet its appearance changes with different processes, recalls skin, concrete, or blobs of paint. It expands and shifts, acquiring a vulnerability that is full of inherent contradictions and metaphorical implications. This material integrity is central to the work’s effect. For instance, abaca, the strongest natural plant fiber, increases its durability the more it is beaten. Just as the body holds somatic memory, pulp can hold still or be reanimated. The significance of the interiority— which contains no armature— is evoked through sly transposition, wherein a plush-looking surface is sawed into revealing a dense brick of matter or a delicate film of urethane appears to have eroded through a composite slab. Within this structural dialogue, Anagnos questions how something can be its opposite, or have no opposite at all; be of the Earth, but not of this world, that is, the world of established letters and binary systems.

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Eleanna Anagnos is a Greek-American artist and curator residing in Mexico City and New York City. She earned her MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art and a BA with honors and distinction from Kenyon College with a concentration in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Maake Magazine, and Artnet, among other publications. She has received awards from Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, The Grant Wood Art Colony, The Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, Yaddo, BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation, The Anderson Ranch, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. Since 2014, Anagnos has been a Co-Director at Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run, non-profit gallery located in Brooklyn, NY, supporting artists from marginalized and underrepresented communities. Her curatorial projects have been featured in Art in America, The New York Times, Artnet, and the New York Observer.

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BOMB Magazine | Rock, Paper, Scissors: Eleanna Anagnos Interviewed by Fawn Krieger

Maake Magazine | Artist Spotlight: Eleanna Anagnos by Emily Burns