Lauren Fensterstock.   Gathering Tiers: The Work of Judith Allen-Efstathiou

Catalogue Essay, Jill Yakas Gallery (March/April 2003)

The artist left the New World for the Old. She returned and she departed and she repeated. This is the journey at the center of Judith Allen-Efstathiou's work. Like the most compelling of memoirs, her artwork shares the point of view of an individual and the unique and invariably complicated mixture of facts and instances that come together across cultures and oceans, across centuries and languages, to translate into a singular understanding.

If Modernism can be seen as an attempt to escape specific historic and cultural reference, then Judith Allen-Efstathiou's work is utterly in opposition; it is an embracing realm where fragments are precious reminders of moments, of individuals, and the contexts that conspired to cultivate their existence. Formally, her work clearly references Modern ideas. Her subject matter and content, however, dismissively reject the abstract and the universal. She takes a heroic color-field painting and covers it with flowers. She creates a flat composition and fills it with an autobiography of images. Seamlessly marrying Modern compositional elements with individual and culturally loaded imagery, she creates a system of storytelling and identity-building purely her own.

In works like "Stitched Together," Allen-Efstathiou creates a rich field by layering images made by artists in her family. Through the process of Xerox lithography, Allen-Efstathiou is able to borrow images created over a span of a century and to combine them with her own contemporary sensibility and technique. The final work includes an illustration originally rendered in pencil by her bed stricken great-grandfather. His image is a meticulously decorative imitation, a product of Victorian culture.   Her mother's academic studies of faces, by contrast, have a modern sensibility. They are quick. Their goal is definite and scientific.   Weaving these two disparate images together, visually and metaphorically is Allen-Efstathiou's grandmother's handiwork.   This is the stitching of an Appalachian quilt. Her marks are both decorative and filled with purpose. Allen-Efstathiou's own composite adds the fourth voice to this imaginary dialog.

This unusual family history effectively takes the pages of a photo album and compresses them into one. By juxtaposing these images, Allen-Efstathiou creates a world of comparison where each family member is made unique by their personal creation and where acts of making stand in as clues to individual biography.   Each fragment is hedged by the culture and time of the maker's life. Each fragment thus becomes a product of individual and public influence. When we realize that this is Allen-Efstathiou's family, we are made aware of the realm of influence that informs her voice as an individual and as an artist.   Her final work is a composite of personal and cultural identification. This is the stuff of both bedtime stories and art history books.

Allen-Efstathiou's newest body of work, the Botanical, is also loaded with a compelling combination of references. The work is collectively a tourist's snapshot of Greek botany, an autobiographical journey, a comment on ornamentation, and a critique of ritual costume. Her use of healing plants revisits Joseph Beuys' therapeutic prescriptions for art, but her reference to clothing in the titles, "prom dress", " wedding dress", "housedress", links the work to another more domestic tradition. She thus dismisses Beuys' monumental vision in exchange for a more intimate narrative about surviving the rituals of a woman's life.

Hints of language are also present here. In Housedress With Heraldic Beasts , a line of heraldic beasts creeps into the plane like a subtitle. The piece Temple of Athena at Polis juxtaposes a field of wildflowers against graffiti carved in the temple base. These fragments add another time based layer and a cultural specificity to this composite. More subtly, the prose fills the absence of an existing written family narrative.

In absence of family members, Allen-Efstathiou finds a telling portrait in the contents of a jewelry box and a sewing kit. She identifies her daughter by the eclectic mess in her handbag. In Allen-Efstathiou's world anything is game for appropriation because nothing is universal. Every object is a component that participates in the world. Every object has a unique story to tell. Allen-Efstathiou's smallest fragments claim their identity and their heritage, challenging us to do the same.

Lauren Fensterstock , Director of the Hay Gallery, Portland, Maine