Judith Allen-Efstathiou & Eirene Efstathiou.
Stereo photograph by Ralph Johnston. Cross your eyes to see us in 3D.

ANO KATO at the Benaki Museum
including drawings by Judith Allen-Efstathiou
April 27 - August 15, 2009
at The Benaki Museum main building
Koumbari 1, Athens, Greece
www.benaki.gr

Center for Maine Contemporary Art 2008 Biennial including a painting by Judith Allen-Efstathiou:
August 9 to October 4, 2008,
162 Russel Ave. Rockport Maine.
www.cmcanow.org

2007 PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART BIENNIAL including Eirene Efstathiou's four panel painting Blowup.
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
April 12 to June 18, 2007
www.portlandmuseum.org/art/biennial.shtml

THE OTHER BIENNIAL SHOW AT THE WHITNEY
including paintings by Eirene Efstathiou
Whitney Art Works, Portland Maine
April 9- May 12, 2007
www.whitneyartworks.com

WAX, including the encaustic work of Judith Allen-Efstathiou
Whitney Art Works, Portland Maine
June 13 - July 21, 2007
www.whitneyartworks.com

UP CLOSE, including the work of Judith Allen-Efstathiou
Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, Maine 
July - Sept, 2007
www.cmcanow.org

FLOWER POWER, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art
including drawings by Judith allen Efstathiou
Jan. - Feb. 2009
at CMCA Rockport Maine,USA
www.cmcanow.org

The Imprint of Place Maine Printmaking 1800-2005
A print of Judith Allen-Efstathiou is included in the recently published book , The Imprint of Place Maine Printmaking 1800-2005 (page 121, Chapter From Traditional to Digital 1980 to 2003 ) illustrated survey by David Becker published by Center for Maine Contemporary Art, with Down East Books, 2006, ( ISBN: 0-89272-718-7).
www.downeastbooks.com

Eirene Efstathiou
Days of 1988: Based on a True Story

In Greek modernist poetry, there is a tradition of writing poems for a certain year entitled "The Days of..." In the poems, the year often functions as a political subtext to the seemingly everyday narrative of the poem.

This project takes its name from those poems and, like the poems, I am positing an ordinary, loosely biographical narrative as a way to think about the events of that year. I am fascinated by 1988 as "the year before," that is, the year before the Berlin wall came down, the emblematic fall of the Iron Curtain.   I am interested in the possibility of describing a massive paradigm shift such as this, without using the iconic images usually associated with it, and instead taking a more lateral, subjective, associational approach.

This multiple paneled piece is structured as a series of stills from a hypothetical documentary from 1988.   Like a documentary, all available source materials are used: home-movies, newsreels etc.

Eirene Efstathiou
Site Seen

This collaborative project with Maria Michou and Iris
Plaitaki considers a ubiquitous phenomenon of modern
Athens: the traces of demolished buildings that
remain on the sides of the surrounding existing
structures. These “building traces” or “phantom
buildings” are something that we have all been
independently interested in for some time.

Using these sites/images as a starting point, the
project takes the form of a dialog in which we see how
each of us handles the same subject matter in her own
voice and medium.

Athens has been in an almost constant state of
demolishing and rebuilding for the last 30 years. As
peripheral sites to this building boom, we examine
what the “phantom buildings” can tell us about the
taste, attitude towards functionality, and visions of
utopia, of each generation’s engineers of the modern
city. We also hope the project will raise questions
about city space in general, as a text that is
constantly revising itself and the palimpsestic
relationship of architecture to the history of a site.

Judith Allen-Efstathiou
Conversations

I am working on two collaborative projects with the women inmates of Koridalos Prison, Athens, Greece and with women of Oasis Siwa in the Great Sand Sea of Western Egypt. For my part I print images of Greek, healing plants on cloth in my Athens studio and send them to these groups of women through two intermediaries:   My friend, Eva Heiadaki a , a fiber artist who has weekly sewing sessions with women inmates of Koridalos Prison, brings my work to the inmates, asking them to sew their own original designs over my prints.   Similarly Hans Jansson, a Swedish, fashion designer who I have printed for, brings my prints to the women of Oasis Siwa on his trips there for work. Because it is culturally taboo for the women to have direct communication with Han or any man outside their families, Hans communicates my request for the   Siwa women to embroider their own original designs over my prints through a relative of the women. The Siwa women work together on this collaborative project in their homes not far from the temple where Alexander the Great was crowned Sun King. In this way, despite the constraints of prison walls, geography, language and culture, the women of Koridalos and Oasis Siwa are able to engage in a conversation with me in a shared language of fabric, pattern and ornamentation.