Katerina Biliouri has a great interview with photographer/sculptor Petros Chrisostomou on Yatzer. I don’t think it quite gets across or reaches an answer, however, about what makes his work so fascinating. First and foremost, Petros mentions scale as his primary tool to tantalize the viewer.

His work reminds me of the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey titled “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” in which we see David Bowman (Keir Dullea) watch himself age, die, and transform into the Star Child.

Inside the Louis XVI style room, scale, time, point of view, and content are distorted in a surreal, dream-like manner. The way in which the objects seem out of place, but somehow inseparable from the room because of their place in the non-linear web of David’s (and our) experience, elicits the same feeling I get from Petros’ photos. It is as if Petros’ and Kubrik’s rooms cannot exist without the objects within them. Though the objects seem strange in their setting, the setting itself is disgusting or impossible (or maybe just useless) without them.

There is an intimacy made so apparent not only through the sheer scale of Petros’ objects but also through the nature of the objects themselves. They have to do with direct experience: the eggs, the pens, the pennies, the fungus. These are all objects completely common and tangible, able to fit in the grip of our hands, but in his photos/sculptures, they are exploded into something unmanageable and unable to be manipulated, used, or experienced directly. The statement is doubled by the medium: a photo (which is posted, blogged, emailed, dispersed over and over) of a sculpture that in itself represents something real that has passed on, something that already occurred (memories). We are three-times removed from the experience itself, but shot back into it through the uniqueness of how it is presented.

We are experiencing the fiction of memory and, in essence, the fiction of experience.