ARTIST STATEMENT
Text, urban landscapes and out of focus images show up regularly in my work as the aesthetic vocabulary I employ to investigate the intersection of economic and social justice in the feminist perspective. Reimagining the public housing I have known as home as a space of poetic revelation, I transform the projects into sites of reverie. Rooted in photography, my practice also employs collage and language to consider the connections between the personal/political and the aesthetic. The aesthetics of containment and surveillance, and the meditative visual space, invite us to contemplate our emotional responses to race, class and difference, in the service of a renewed critical consciousness.
My work is concerned with how the aesthetics of place contains within itself systemic exclusionary practices that keep people on the margins, and opportunities for imagining practices of living otherwise. I’m asking how the creativity of the subjugated creates utopic spaces and underground networks of mutuality and autonomy. The hope of the project rests in imagining that visual culture could encourage the awakening of a political sensibility driven by a love ethic of collectivity and compassion.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Magda Parasidis is a visual artist, designer and cultural worker, born in Athens, Greece. She immigrated to New York City in 1980. Parasidis received a B.A. in Art History and International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University, followed by engagements with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters Art Gallery and the Guggenheim Collection, Venice. She holds a graduate degree in Advanced Artistic Studies from the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan. Parasidis’s text-based art and photography practice focuses on the intersection of economic and racial justice with poor people’s rights in the feminist perspective. She received a 2018 and 2019 Greater Columbus Arts Council grant, and a 2021 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. The monograph Magda Parasidis: Ghosts in Sunlight was published in 2021 in conjunction with an exhibition at Otterbein University. Her work has been recognized in statewide juried exhibitions and is held in both private and public collections. She lives with her husband and two children in Columbus, Ohio.
© Magda Parasidis