The artist gives collective meaning to fragments of her family’s stories.
Nicole Economides
A painting introspection on memory and identity
Text: Alexandra Koroxenidi
The work of Nicole Economides (b. New York, 1992) revolves around the story of her family, and the immigration of her great grandfather, grandfathers and parents to different countries all over the world, seeking a better future. Her work is based on memories, stories and family archives (mainly letters, postcards and photos with family snapshots) she discovered while moving back to Greece following her postgraduate studies on Fine Arts, at New York’s Parsons School of Design, amidst a personal introspection during the pandemic.
The artist recasts these images into a painting language that oozes the feeling of a personal yet collective journey, of the endless quest for a sense of origin and a certain “belonging”. Her works range from the specific to the general, raising questions with regard to Greek identity and cultural stereotypes. Moreover, they praise family ties, the importance of community, as well as the values reflected in everyday life.
Through the various aspects of the past everyday life of her family, which emerge half-erased via painted words and phrases, Nicole Economides’ work echoes the life of Greek immigrants and their uprooting from their birthplace. The viewer follows an inner path, where time is dilated and the notion of place is often interpreted with a vibe of melancholy and curiosity, as a fluid and in-between space that glimmers between reality and fantasy/desire. The layers of history meet the ones of memory and of the imaginary, defining one another, while the painting space visualizes this virtual and intangible place called memory.
The concept of home place as a conceptual, experienced or imaginary pillar is moving and shifting alongside the dreams and expectations of people who come and go, changing their residence. As a result of this process, home place is transformed into anything we carry and safeguard inside of us. In the solo exhibition held in 2023 under the distinctive title Illusions of home, as a memory (a phrase borrowed by Lucy R. Lippard’s book The Lure of the Local [1997]), Nicole Economides explores the notion of non-place that exists only in the form of absence and as a trace of immigration.
Such a place is the house her parents began to build upon their return to Athens, destined to remain incomplete as they decided to leave Greece once again due to the financial crisis. “The building now stands empty yet full of meanings, like the permanent symbol of a debt unlikely to be settled. I placed a slide with a family photo from the 1969 Easter in New York on the plan view, portraying my grandparents and my mother, and through this concoction I tried to depict the common experience of three generations; their common search for a way to return “home” – whether real or invented.” The series of works titled Dream House (2022) includes, among others, embedded images within drawings or plan views of the archaeological site of Acropolis. This way, two different facets of Greek history are juxtaposed in contact and in contrast with one another, highlighting the need for a steady point of reference. This solid bedrock is symbolized by the objective and structured architectural plan.
This sense of interim and in-between is a pivotal concept I endlessly explore through my work as it mirrors my own experience of belonging.
This two-face status of stability and shakiness, translocation and permanence, strength and fragility, the real and the imaginary, the mundane and the monumental is underlying beneath the entire spectrum of her work. “This sense of interim and in-between is a pivotal concept I endlessly explore through my work as it mirrors my own experience of belonging.” She carries this experience inside of her constantly, starting from her ties to the USA all the way to her bond with Pontus and Asia Minor, the places of her distant roots. And that’s how reality seems to be fleeting away, lost behind the layers of time, decay and memory.
The Easter in Brooklyn (2022) series, featuring prints of family photos on pillows, expresses this indeterminate reality. The pillow serves as the surface upon which is projected the unconscious, as well as the mobile object of a “home appliance” that moves from one place to another. “As an object inextricably linked to dreams and memory, a place where images and experiences are intertwined, the pillow is transformed into a counter site, pretty much like the invented houses described in Michel Foucault’s theory on heterotopias.”
The non-place gives birth to the need of permanence, which takes the form an almost existential need to reconnect with the past in Economides’ work; a profound desire for its reconstitution within the realm of memory, which soothes the feeling of transit and loss. For instance, in the painting installation Birthday Blue (2024) included in the solo exhibition Sunday Afternoon Economides paints a birthday photo of her mother at the age of five on twelve canvases, appropriating the process of developing a photographic film. Economides modifies the tone of blue in each work, so that the image gets more and more blurrish, triggering a two-way course: from memory to oblivion and vice-versa. Through repetition, a photo’s momentary nature is endowed with a sense of duration, and is inscribed in memory. By extension, photos serve as a time travel, bridging the past with the present.
Economides reenacts these lost routes often using vivid colors that reflect the disposition of each work. The postcards and family photos sent by her grandmother from the US to her relatives in the 1960s are a key motif in her work, portraying distinctive scenes at the family restaurant, such as counting the weekly earnings. Steadily focusing her interest on anything that remains secret, concealed or forgotten, she places emphasis on the postcards’ rear side that includes phrases such as “here’s the store’s kitchen”, or even the Kodak seal of quality. Emulating the handwriting of her grandmother, Economides reproduces these images in works of painting. The artist confers the status of an inscription to these simple phrases, while placing her canvas stretchers on theme-related objects like a couple of cheese bins (Sunday Afternoon 2024). The work becomes somewhat of a structural element, intrinsic with the notion of journey. “The work placed on these objects carries the weight of memory and of a keepsake, acquiring multidimensional aspects.”
As a bilingual child of immigrants, Economides approaches the act of writing as a form of communication, a source of origin and a means of knowledge transmission in several of her painting works (2022), which are reminiscent of language teaching cards for children; the image visualizes the word, and the word becomes a hybrid of English and Greek: mappa for a mop, freeza for a freezer. “To me, letters are transformed into a painting gesture, whereas the painting obtains cultural features and is linked to a particular geographical location, a ‘place’. The language serves as a means of transport that connects my work with Greece.” A series of works (2019-2020) that allude to Cy Twombly, interweaving writing with prints that depict photos of antiquities or archaeological excavations, foreground the perception of Ancient Greece in rapport with the Greek identity as formed in contemporary history. Economides also questions the conventional and shallow approach of cultural institutions towards Classical Ancient Greece on an international scale. “Through my work I wanted to reclaim my own mythology, aiming at empowerment and personal expression.”
Economides looks into the question of belonging, seeking to unveil the aspects of a multifarious intercultural identity. She has a number of honorary distinctions under her belt, such as the Hopper Award (2024) and many scholarships and prizes, while also having taken part in many collective exhibitions both in Greece and abroad. Moreover, she has hosted solo exhibitions in Greece (CallirrhoëGallery, Athens) and has worked as a curator in exhibitions held in the USA.
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