Déjà Vu 1994

Art builds one more layer to reality and offers yet another perspective of viewing the world. The mediating role of art is another issue through which the work of D. Meimaroglou can be considered. In Deposition a work, from the Déjà Vu series, the artist has manipulated a news-clipping of a young man who was shot dead and carried by the police, to look like Christ deposed from his crucifixion in a Caravaggio painting. In a similar manner, she has altered the image of a war refugee woman holding her baby (November Seventh) to look like a Madonna from a Leonardo da Vinci painting by merely changing her head posture. According to the artist, appropriation is a way of building new systems of meaning out of new visual relationships. In other words Despina Meimaroglou suggests that art is one such system that not only revises reality and its representation in the media but also art itself.