While many baked cloud bread or binge-watched “Tiger King” during the COVID quarantine, Upper School substitute teacher Eleftheria Lialios found inspiration in her own backyard, channeling it into her photography. From November 25 to December 20, Gallery Two will display her artwork, “Timing Birds” and “Through the Lens.”
Ms. Lialios began to photograph the birds living in her garden. “They were not exotic birds,” Ms. Lialios said. “Timing Birds,” a series of images taken from observations of her kitchen window, featured an ordinary fowl. “It’s not like I went to Fiji. They were just common, backyard birds … trying to survive.”
“I decided that there was a language that I saw within the [flocks] themselves,” she said. “I chose to convey [that language] in the form of ‘bird boxes.’” She filled these boxes with color transparency lenses containing her images.
“I liked the fact that you could see one through the other. It was a photograph, but it wasn’t limited to just being flat,” she said.
But photography isn’t just a hobby for Ms Lialios—she is a prolific and accomplished artist. “I made about 30 of [the bird boxes], which were shown in a gallery on Michigan Avenue.”
True to her craft, she curated every part of the 2020 exhibit, down to the acoustics. “I included within that space an audio mix of recorded bird calls. So as a person walked into the gallery, they heard the bird calls.”
“Birds don’t belong in cages,” Ms. Lialios said. “Because the environment is getting destroyed, I needed to make work that brought the viewer … a reminder of their presence in our atmosphere.”
By showcasing creatures often viewed as “common,” Ms. Lialios highlighted the unappreciative attitude towards nature many have come to take on in urban settings. Finches, robins, and sparrows that are brushed past have unappreciated beauty and value to human life.
“If the birds die, we die,” she said. “They’re crucial to our survival, [through] seed dispersal [and] food production. There’s so much that birds contribute to our lives.”
By applying for a grant through The Puffin Foundation, a society that funds artists whose works bring awareness to climate change, Ms. Lialios financed her art and found another gallery to display it, and her show ran earlier this November. “I had asked Mr. Haverland if he was interested in showing the work [after the exhibit had closed], and he said yes.”
Upper School visual arts teacher Derek Haverland said, “Since becoming Department Chair, I have been seeking out members of the Latin community to exhibit their work. … I have wanted to point out how creativity is expressed by the people we are surrounded by every day.
Ms. Lialios is known to almost everyone in the Upper School, and I’m so happy to have her share her two bodies of work.”
In Gallery Two, Latin students saw a slice of Ms. Lialios’s recent show at the Agitator Gallery downtown, including panels of birds, landscape photographs, and frames of dragonflies.
“I decided to also include my newest work, which is called ‘Through the Lens,’” Ms. Lialios said. “My daughter had given me a telescope, and I decided to take pictures through my telescope of the moon. The thing is … it’s like a cheap telescope, and there’s no way I could replicate the images of the moon taken on the James Webb telescope. I mean, those are amazing! And so I thought, how can I actually create something that’s unique?”
The answer: creating magical-looking mist within her bathroom sink, then layering the photographs of the haze on top of her moon images, all within a kaleidoscope-like lens on a tripod. “The viewer became a photographer: They looked through this pretend lens, and they saw this landscape,” she said.
Among students viewing “Through the Lens” was freshman Carly Rosenberg. “It allows me to look into another world,” she said.
Ms. Lialios’ astronomical artwork propelled her to become a finalist in designing the Florida Space Monument in Tallahassee, a call to artists to create a piece to honor the contributions of all individuals who have aided humanity’s ventures into the galaxy. She submitted “Through The Lens” earlier this year. “It would be the first time a woman would design a monument for space,” she said.
With thousands of applicants, the chances of winning are slim, but Ms. Lialios doesn’t seem cynical. “Being an artist for a long time, you get a lot of rejections. If you’re not used to rejections, you might as well get out of applying for anything competitive.”
Through her work, Ms. Lialios creates an intimacy between the work and the viewer, allowing them a glimpse inside her artistic mind.
