CLEA CHRISTAKOS-GEE

In the Third considers the devoted and complex art practices of the women in my maternal family and their influence on my personal desires as an image maker. The project uses an integration of text, image, and collage to visually articulate my interpretation of a connectivity across three generations. I am curious about the creative aspirations I have inherited from my mother Margaret Christakos, who is an artist and poet, and those passed down from my grandmother Mary Jane Christakos, who was a visual artist and owned an art store in Sudbury, Ontario. The mediums of collage and photography provide different affective modes for locating these layered negotiations of memory and imagination, family and autonomy, material and trace. The text fragments used in the collage works are drawn from my mother’s poetic memoir Her Paraphernalia published in 2016. Thematically, the book delves into powerful mid-life reflections on female agency, loss, and a search for intergenerational continuity through the mother-daughter lines of our family. The imagery in the collages comes from an incidental archive of photo-clippings gathered by my grandmother and used as teaching references for drawing and painting lessons at her art store. Using the respective artistic materials of my mother and grandmother to make new assemblages allows me to claim subjectivity in relation to my attachments and influences — particularly as they are shown in dialogue with my photographs taken in Sudbury, the place that has shaped my tangible connection to this matrilineage and my photography practice.