“Model for a Gazebo from ‘The Timing of Birds'” by Eleftheria Lialios
Art has the power to contribute to our overall well being. It can inform and guide everything in our life. In the visual arts, it makes connections through our visual cortex, bringing up past associative memories stored in our brain. It can help direct the future, or simply point to life forms living with us, reminding us of our small species friends. Model for a Gazebo, was built as a maquette for a child size Gazebo where small children can enter and be surrounded by common birds living in our atmosphere. Because birds are essential to our ecosystem and survival, their presence in a small space would give viewers inspiration, calm, comfort, and a much needed humor. Anthropomorphic connections will happen, laughter will ensue, conversations created. Art can transform an individual’s mindset to a calmer, more relaxed place. My new work makes that happen more than any other public work I have created in the past 40 years.
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Eleftheria Lialios’ Artist Statement:
I was born in Greece to Albanian refugees escaping tyranny in their country. At 28, I became a photographer to become a visual activist. My first works were documentary, forgotten communities in Detroit, giving them visual presence, forgotten by a city that was being ravaged by poverty, crime. After graduate school, I began making large color transparencies, placed in buildings in Chicago. I am a political artist, whose work has changed from loud cries of injustice to awareness of planet life. I am still creating, exhibiting my work, finding new visions to bring attention to the urgency for climate action.
