ONE PLUS ONE

Willa Van Nostrand
& Aaron Pexa

Photo: Aaron Pexa, video still / FaveLAB.

"TEMPLE OF AZURITE"

A mulitsensorial toast to the eternal Goddess of Energy

PERFORMANCE: 12 October 2024

Visual artists and performers Aaron Pexa and Willa Van Nostrand (Milan/New York City) visited Athens in October 2024 to erect their „Temple of Azurite“, an immersive installation and ephemeral tribute to the archetypical goddess, known in Greece under various names: Demeter, Athena. Gaia. Their art project explores modes of storytelling through ritual, theatre, song, and taste, and uncovers the unbroken ties that bridge the past with contemporary Hellenic civilization.

The art project „Temple of Azurite“ includes light installation, video projection, set pieces and vocal performance. The three acts performance culminates in the offering of a wine-based elixir to all gallery guests. This neo-kykeon, a potable allusion to the mysterious and sacred drink of the Eleusinian Mysteries, is both part of a ceremonial ritual and of the ‘embodiment’ concept of the performance. It will be served in distinct stoneware cups the artists created in Athens inspired by the Cycladic and Neolithic pottery collections of the National Archeological Museum of Athens. The cups will be distributed to gallery guests during the performance.

During their Artist Residency at FaveLAB Athens, the artist duo experimented with the conceptual reinterpretation of ancient Greek temple worship inspired by their visits to Elefsina, the Acropolis Museum, the Parthenon, ancient Corinth, Delphi, and the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. A video featuring the Temple of Azurite Athens project will be screened at SMCK ON REEL Video Festival at Galerie Handwerk Munich in March 2025.

Pexa and Van Nostrand first met in Rhode Island in 2018 and collaborated as Artists-in-Residence at Officina Stamperia Del Notaio in Tusa, Italy in the summer of 2023. Their installation and performance, Theatre of the Roof, the Arch, and the Octagon, created a public event to activate a piazza and bring the town together for an evening of art, music, and celebration.

Aaron Pexa is an American artist, architect, and lighting designer whose work manifests curiosity and a sense of bewilderness through projection, optics, and appropriated antique objects. His multimedia works, and video fracture and reframe everyday environments through the creation of artifacts, sleight-of-hand actions, and experimental operations.

Willa Van Nostrand is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and mixologist working between studios in Providence, Rhode Island and Sicily. She works across painting, sculpture, performance and taste to engage the associative realm of the viewer’s mind. Willa has worked with RISD Museum, Peabody Essex Museum and Light Space Studios in New York. She founded World’s Fair Gallery and Little Bitte Artisanal Cocktails, a garden-to-glass cocktail company in 2010.

Willa Van Nostrand: www.willavannostrand.com | @wmvn
Aaron Pexa: www.aaronpexa.com | @aaronpexa

EVENT: 12 October 2024, 7.30 - 9.30 p.m

VENUE: Efi Kazantzi Alternative Gallery
Agiou Dimitriou 30, 10554 Athens / Psirri
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Download the e-invitation (PDF)