Effi Karakaidos
February 2004

“All margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. So also have bodily parings, skin, and nail, hair clippings and sweat. The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins. There is no reason to assume any primacy for the individual’s attitude to his own bodily and emotional experience, any more than for his cultural and social experience.” (-Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.)

As a woman, and as an artist, I have negotiated boundaries my entire life. We all have. What determines an individual is which boundaries we choose to honor or transgress. As an artist, I attempt to shift these borders- bring attention to our thoughts and ideas about rules- rules about beauty, desire, right and wrong. My path at Vermont College led me to explore the idea of ‘portrait’ as literal traces from inside the body in combination with cultural and social influences. I am especially interested in negotiating the taboo and abject in a way that is effective with an audience, rather than only repulsive.

Since graduating, I have continued to explore identity and alternate portraitures with photography.

Effi Karakaidos completed her BA in Art at UCLA in 1993. Effi lives in San Diego, where she has had two solo shows at the Museum of the Living Artist since VC. She is an instructor at the Art Institute of California, San Diego. Courses taught: Observational Drawing, Design, Perspective, and Digital Photography.

“Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” (Susan Sontag On Photography)

“A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents. It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures. The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive (I didn’t yet know that this stubbornness of the Referent in always being there would produce the essence I was looking for).” (Roland Barthes Camera Lucida)

“We might say that the capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience is, in fact, exemplified by the souvenir. Like the collection, the souvenir always displays the romance of contraband, for its scandal is its removal from its “natural” location. …Freud’s description of the genesis of the fetish: a part of the body is substituted for the whole, or an object is substituted for the part, until finally, and inversely, the whole body can become object, substituting for the whole.”

“We must distinguish between souvenirs which are most often representations and are purchasable, and the souvenirs of individual experience, which are most often samples and are not available as general consumer goods. While the personal memento is of little material worth, it is of great worth to its possessor. Because of its connection to biography and its place in constituting the notion of individual life, the memento becomes emblematic of the worth of that life and of the self’s capacity to generate worthiness.”
(Susan Stewart On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection)