Zoe Elefterin

Zoe Elefterin is an artist living in Brooklyn, New York and is a recent grad from Pratt Institute’s Photography program. Her work aims to construct narratives that explore the nature of a body translated and reimagined as an image. Using both found commercial imagery and self portraits, Elefterin is able to explore the idiosyncrasies of her own image through photographing herself. Growing up as a dancer, Elefterin’s technique was formed around maintaining her femininity and being able to dramatically project it. Through studying dance and performance, the concept of constructing a persona and being aware of her body became central to her mission as an artist, and although she doesn’t practice dance as much as she used to, she considers her art to be an incredibly performative meditation. The woman as something that is molded and objectified is a concept that is incredibly personal to Elefterin, as her coming of age as a woman was drastically shaped around her ability to be seen, without flaws, with perfect technique, and informed by over a decade of training.


Untitled


Shrunken down/blown to pieces


Bella Reclining

Resolution Not Equal to Size

THOUGHTS ON CREATING

There is the male gaze,
the female gaze,

and then…

There is the illogical, tradition-breaking world of the omnipotent lens of the digital camera, the cyborg construction of a person,

shrunken down and blown to pieces.

The process of transmissions and multiplications of my representative body and representative body of work is one that focused on a series of actions that often include: A photograph captured, a photograph printed, a photograph printed again, a scan, a digital edit, a questioning of the contents and definitions of a photograph, a “final print,” and so on.

The technology with which we create a person that is separate from the person we inhabit is holistically experiential. A new “whole” is fabricated.

The performative figures are often not representative of my identity. They have adopted their own idiosyncrasies and are not cemented to a representation of self. They are vessels for exploration.

My work is a dramatic meditation on the difficulty to provide a constant, beautiful presentation of oneself. The congruence of performance and image create a place where the ease in looking can be annihilated. Each experiment is a factorial of the predecessor, a newly minted creation of an otherwise unfinished image.

Beauty is ephemeral, known to age, wither, and ruin.

Shrunken down and blown to pieces.


Try Her On


Untitled #1


Untitled #2


Untitled #3


Untitled, 1985


Mother


Untitled


Untitled


Untitled


Untitled


Untitled


Untitled


Paint Chips


Untitled


Untitled


Meditation #1-15


YOUR SKIN IS FRAGILE LIKE PAPER

To view more of Zoe Elefterin’s work please visit their website.