A New Page
Maria Karametou
Bethesda, Maryland
A New Page, 2007
Mixed media
As an immigrant coming to the U.S. from Greece, a country with a homogeneous population, I was naïve at first about the various types of bigotry I would be subjected to. I had no idea what I could do, preferring to “just grin and bear it.”When I first read the books that Speaking Volumes provided, and because of my personal experiences, I was outraged and reacted very forcefully. In the end, I realized that I don’t want to fight hate with more hate with this project. I simply wanted to wash off the foulness, erase it all, and render it powerless, clean it out like a wound so that it can pollute no more.After experimenting with various liquids and solvents, I decided to first cleanse the book pages with green soap. I then separated them from the book and rendered the writing on them powerless by superimposing the 1/2” white margins. This gave me two new composite blank pages on which I printed the universal symbols of a man and a woman. At the bottom of the work, there is a sphere covered with the ashes of the remaining pages. It stands as testimony to all the lives that hatred has cut short.
Bio
Maria Karametou is a mixed media artist whose work has been exhibited extensively both in the U.S. and internationally, including The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; The Vorres Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; The Ludwig Museum for International Art,Aachen, Germany; the Elite Gallery, Moscow, Russia; Apartman Projeci,Istanbul, Turkey; The Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C; The John Elder Gallery, New York; Trito Mati Gallery, Athens, Greece; The C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland; among numerous others. She is a professor at George Mason University.