In the third installment of TAVROS' series exploring our interconnectedness with the earth and the subterranean, Petros Moris presents ALONE, a deeply reflective exhibition that delves into the origins and materials that shape our identities.
The series of ten sculptures in ALONE are anchored in an abandoned urban playground in Lamia, Moris' hometown, where a mosaic crafted by his parents became the inadvertent centerpiece of this origin story. Tagged with the word "Alone" by a local graffiti artist, the mosaic’s transition from a public artifact to an 'assembled cultural artefact' under Moris’ vision reflects on the communal and anonymous layers of workmanship, labor, and authorship.
ALONE emerges as a parable on provenance, questioning the essence of our existence: what constitutes our being, who molds our identities, and how the flows of information, soil, and urban detritus converge in our formation. The exhibition's introspective narrative probes the extent to which biography informs our creations, juxtaposing the artist's personal history with broader social and historical contexts.
The eerie post-human sculptures and ghost-like mosaic slabs cast from the original found mosaic at TAVROS embody Moris' contemplation on scale, entropy, and the geological versus the urban. Mosaic-making's inherent importance of scale is woven throughout, spanning the abstract non-human (molecular or quantum) to the human and cultural, and finally to the 'sensible'—that which humans can comprehend as a representational whole. This multi-scalar approach encapsulates genealogy, connecting parent to child, past to present, and situates the abandoned playground within a continuum from the literal to the cosmological, akin to the zooming perspective in Powers of Ten.
Moris’ sculptures, influenced by ancient toys or votive offerings from nearby graves, are transfigured through digital fabrication and traditional sculpting into ghoulish hybrid creatures. These beings straddle the line between playthings and haunting species, reflecting the technological mediation that recontextualizes ancient cultural artifacts into contemporary sculptural continuities and material ruptures. Moris' ambivalence and discomfort with what these creatures imply and reveal hint at a deeper unease regarding the integration of personal, social, historical, and technological narratives.
In an innovative expansion of his practice, Moris incorporates a textual element into the exhibition, an essay that oscillates between personal reflections and philosophical musings. This dense, labyrinthine text underscores the material and thematic weight of the sculptures, reinforcing the exhibition's complex interplay of language, materiality, and flesh.
