Konstantin Dimopoulos - The Shower Room
Until 8 October 2011 at the Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney - Australia
‘Transformation’ is the focus of this new installation by Konstantin Dimopoulos. The black-and-white Bergman-like images, seemingly crafted from some Nordic or Barbaric lands, are transplanted effortlessly here in this Antipodean landscape. In The Shower Room, Dimopoulos creates a series of modular shower units, five in total. Each stand-alone work is 3 meters in height, made of black steel, with a shower unit held on five stem pediments. The dark spider-like legs, long and extended, splay outwards from the centre of the shower, each leg sitting on castors that allow them to move freely. Their mobility is a statement in itself, the portability of ideas.
These industrial fittings originally designed for a domestic setting are now transformed to some other purpose, some political convenience. Conceived to cleanse the living, brutal pieces of the ordinary, that transform the day-to-day bathroom shower to something more malevolent. Statements of man’s creative imagination. These showers have a similarity to the showers we know and use. And yet our memory tells us that we have seen these images before within a different context. They stand like black triffids in rows, waiting to be activated. Their long necks curving down, with shards of white lines raining out from their steel perforated shower heads towards the floor.
In the smaller gallery, we see another installation The Bed–Sitting Room. To one side of the room sits a black iron bed. Again the idea of transformation and memory is brought into play. We have seen this room before but something has changed. The bed seems strangely altered, stretched and emaciated. On the wall a drawing of a family portrait from a wedding is slightly off-center, tilted, so that you want to go up and straighten it. While on a shelf metronome-like units keep time. The transformation and monotone nature of these works, the black and white pastiche of colour within the gallery suggest something more of a collective memory exploring the synapses of a common consciousness.
