The exhibition passage(s) / περάσματα will showcase nine large-scale paintings resulting from artist Allyson Glenn’s 2016 residency at the Vorres Museum in Athens, Greece. passage(s) / περάσματα suspends time to illustrate and explore how ancient Greek mythology and its assortment of gods, goddesses, and demigods with human lives might play a productive role in helping us with today’s continuous social upheavals and our chronic incapacity to overcome them. Allyson Glenn is asking if an(other) look back at antiquity might provide insights into our turbulent times. To that effect, Glenn, Janus-like, looking back into Greece’s mythological past and looking forward into its future, examines crossings and transgressions of borders in search of sites of resistance that may expand conventional notions of nation, ethnicity, identities, displacement, migration, and more.

In 2016, Allyson Glenn was the Canadian artist in residence at the Vorres Museum in Paiania, a suburb of Athens, Greece. The Vorres Museum is the brainchild of the late Ion Vorres, a Greek-Canadian with a passion for contemporary visual art but also a strong commitment to preserving Greek artifacts that represent the myriad cultural layers making up Greece now. The museum houses some of the most important Greek artists and artworks of the post–World War II era and is spread over five acres in different buildings—which he bought as soon as he’d saved some money. The buildings are strewn within whimsical gardens and connected by arches, steps, and waterfalls. Throughout the grounds are sculptural pieces: originals and imitations all placed perfectly with his own hands. Allyson lived and worked within this magical place, amid gardens dotted with statues of ancient gods and goddesses, sirens, and other personae from antiquity, where she coaxed apparitions from the Olympian pantheon. She was fascinated by the and was pulled by the “siren call” of the garden and its silent inhabitants—so much so that it transformed Glenn into one of Michel de Certeau’s imaginative and resourceful “flâneuse. After all, the garden’s inhabitants and their deeds gave rise to philosophy, became the bedrock of psychology’s archetypes, inspired the likes of Shakespeare, and, let us not forget, were the dramatis personae in the metaphorical paintings of the Renaissance.

More info