GEORGIA SAGRI. DIANA VERY DOG
November 29, 2012 – March 20, 2013
Opening: Thursday, November 29, 2012 from 12-9PM
CENTRAL FINE presents its inaugural exhibition program with Diana Very Dog, a solo project by Georgia Sagri. Diana, belonging to the roman pantheon of deities, poses a question here. One cannot help to wonder why Sagri invokes her name rather than the Greek goddess Artemis. May be because Diana, belonged to a model, such as the Roman one? And maybe Sagri, an Athenian, is purposefully advocating for a repulse of her national deities by choosing a ’newer’ and more ‘arrow-minded’ version of Artemis? Is Sagri observing the mandate of not using Artemis’ name in vain? Or is it that Sagri is interested in the meteoric trajectory of Diana’s arrow and that her name starts with a d, such as dog or Diogenes’ school of cynics?
Diana has the capacity to speak to animals and she is also an accomplished hunter, qualities that Sagri is after, as seen in her video piece where dogs bark, her wall text, or her photos as a naked nymph with a Rimbaudian haircut. Sagri speaks a speech that seems delivered by a person with a triple id: action & action & action. Such a triple id subject is, surprisingly, in total consciousness and control over the notion of own-her-ship. And let’s be clear here: rather than being spoken to, Sagri speaks to it, first and foremost to herself, and later to us with a present and yet ancient own-her-ship. She navigates the streets/ while delivering a voice/ that tongue/ that form of speech outside the limitations of the history of speech/ that shadow of mystery daily embodied and experienced by herself. Sometimes one thinks that she is made or built by phrases that carry within themselves the problem of force. In that unstable ground, Sagri as a topos, where one can load content hunts for titles, for sounds, for forms that direct her trajectory—the structure of action. On action-place-speech we observe an interest in links and hyper-abstraction while participating. A chorus in the broadcasting of a destabilizing omnipresence: Sagri here, Sagri where, very Sagri, Diana very dog.
Georgia Sagri lives in Athens and New York. She participated in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and has presented exhibitions and performances in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; Real Fine Arts, New York; Andrew Roth Gallery, New York; Terri and Donna Gallery, Miami; the Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami; Lars Friedrich Gallery, Berlin; Sotoso, Brussels; Melaspapadopoulos, Athens, among others. Georgia Sagri has been featured in publications such as Art Forum Magazine, Art in America, Texte zur Kunst, and the New York Times.