Tasos Mylonas
Peacetime Proxy
April 12 – April 26, 2024
Sometimes evolution skids off the rails and the male Babirusa boar’s upper canine teeth grow back towards his forehead or eyes, and begin piercing through. Continuing to curve back in a spiral fashion, the boar’s own tusks can penetrate his skull and cause him to die. The exaggerated tusks play an evolutionary role in the competition for mates, but battles for dominance can also secure their personal survival if, in clashes, their tusks are worn down or broken, and thus the potential for innate self-injury is eliminated.
Peacetime Proxy intimates the inherent contradiction of opposing factions attempting to influence affairs without direct engagement. Tasos Mylonas considers, perhaps paranoically, the inevitability of our engagements with violence. Impressions adhere, horrors render themselves in our minds; everything has violent potential, but everything too has already received it.
A concern with the entropy of the material world and a very physical approach to the process of making ground these works. The forms give way to a delicate material complexity as if the fundamentals of sculpture–to model–have become unmoored from time and history and now live across figure, found object, computer, printer, clay, PLA, media file. Mylonas strips figures and forms down to various essences then rebuilds them in a non-synchronous space where digital and physical processes bridge new mythologies.
A persistent not-muchness of burns, fusions and melts take on a logic greater than themselves when one considers the sculptures together. Residual traces of process mirror exactly what is at work in accumulating layers of historical violence: construction and destruction, unveiling and shrouding. Both materially and thematically, the works in Peacetime Proxy occupy an interstitial space between celebration and sacrifice.
Tasos Mylonas was born in 1987 in Athens, Greece. Graduating with honors from the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2019, and later from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in 2023, Mylonas’ practice blends conceptual, figurative, and digital art. His enduring passion for music has influenced his visual art, fostering a deep appreciation for fundamental concepts such as harmony and rhythm, which resonate throughout his sculptures. Working across mediums, Mylonas’ work initiates reflections about representation, authenticity and gesture. His art is a tapestry of influences, from medieval and ancient iconography to philosophy, history, and religion, interwoven with the cultural imprints of cartoons and video games. These elements, coupled with themes of humanism, posthumanism, and the interplay between nature and convention, shape the narratives at the core of his work, which ultimately delve into psychological exploration.
-Tacy Wagner

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