Ioannis Michalou(di)s
Silica aerogel consists of 99% nothing…, it is the memory of a material… In an age when everything aims at dematerialisation, this material composed of 99% air and 1% glass and follows this age. The ethereal blue quality and its translucency contrasts against the suggested weight of the Cycladic form when it is set against a black background. The opposite complementary color that makes up the Rayleigh scattering -gold yellow- is seen as a formal edge reflecting against the formless black of space. These works are ambiguously both formal and formless, similar to vapour or smoke. When these works are set against the black void, their conflicting qualities speak of the spiritual and the dialectic of material/mystical. These properties stress the function and the binary opposites of colour as complementary and function as an expression of the spiritual, abstract and perhaps mysteries of the cosmos via their ambiguities of space and hue. In my works, many of the sculptures and artworks represent symbolically an anthropomorphised female figure in some of the Neolithic Cycladic figurines, functioning as a “Mother” form. The Mother Earth reference adds poignancy to the sculpted and dematerialised images that could be placed in our CosMuseum. The dialectics of the weight of solid marble and the ethereal light qualities of the silica aerogel provoke feelings of ambiguity in its relationship to the density of the souvenir as an object embodying a sense of memory (and terroir), both formal and informal connotations in its reference to the concepts of the formlessness and its mutability, or the void in its connotations of disappearance. Form functioning against the void and the suggested “memory” of an original form plays with the ideas of plastos in this work― “fake” as in a souvenir taken from the original archaic marble Cycladic sculptures. These are copied into tourist market copies as souvenirs for sale. From these copies Michalous makes a mould (memory) in which the silica aerogel is cast. The point being here that material souvenirs are very different from memories, and the authors hypothesis asks whether the artists operating on the periphery are in a more advantageous position to consider the “collection” of the whole; say of digital memories and works of art in space age materials, not just souvenirs in their materiality Two works reference the duality of the past in the present and extend possibilities for their entire representation within a future museum, through its use of space age material recreates an original form as a duplicate of a missing/lost “idol” which produces a shadowed reflection as an immaterial duplicate. These artwork regenerate the past through their inclusion of lost elements of cultural icons. Their resemblances in the present converge as an idealised representation for the future…
ref: Ioannis Michaloudis, Ian Hance, Katerina Koskina, CosMuseum Project: Memories and Souvenirs from planet Earth. Trends Tech Sci Res. 2018; 3(1): 555604. DOI: 10.19080/TTSR.2018.03.555604
A permanent Magnetic Cloud has been crafted through the utilization of an earth magnet. The composition includes a soda-lime glass bead and iron powder integrated into a 90 mm diameter skydisk. These artworks represent one-of-a-kind creations and are not subject to replication. Each order is handled as a SPECIAL ORDER and entails a waiting period of up to 90 days for delivery.
Upon receipt, customers will be provided with a CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY, personally signed and dated by the artist.
Who is Ioannis Michalou(di)s?
Dr. Ioannis Michalou(di)s is avisual artist, researcher and academic, internationally acknowledged as a leading researcher in Art&Science, and the first to research the application of the nanomaterial silica aerogel in visual arts and design. His career began in Paris, at Sorbonne University, where he presented his thesis on Visual Arts in 1998 on the “Elastic Arts”. After receiving a Fulbright Award, in 2001 he undertook a postdoctoral research on art and nanotechnology at MIT where he started his research on the application of silica aerogel in fine art projects. He had a solo exhibit in the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens and in 2007 he won the Golden Lighthouse in the 24th Biennale of Alexandria, Egypt. He is the author of copious journal papers and two book chapters and he has been invited to more than twenty international art and science exhibitions and conferences. A good reference for Michaloudis’ concept on art et resilience is the following chapter Paton D., Michaloudis I., et al. “Art and Disaster Resilience: Perspectives from the Visual and Performing Arts, in Paton D. and Johnston D.M. (Eds), Disaster Resilience: An integrated approach, (2nd Ed) chapter 12, pp. 212-235, Springfield Ill., USA, Charles C. Thomas Publ., ISBN:978-0-398-09169-9, (edition I and II).
Dr. Michaloudis was coordinating the post-graduate program in Visual Arts at Charles Darwin University, Australia. He is a Research Associate at NCSR Demokritos in Greece.
In 2018 he had exhibited at the MIT Museum for the retrospective exhibition “50 years CAVS”. In 2020 he had collaborated with Boucheron Paris for the creation of the first-ever high jewellery “Goutte de ciel”. An astonishing achievement of Dr. Michaloudis is that at the enf of 2023, two of his silica aerogel artworks will be part of Carnegie Mellon’s University MoonArk project that they will be rocketed to the Moon and exist there for billions of years.