John Conomos The Master Riddler
In the Aegean archipelago, islands call to you. A luminous pulse in the gathering twilight encircled in an aqua sea. Long after they dissolve into distant light-flicker, they return to hover inside, as afterimage. In memory, they ignite an impossible yearning. A call to return. The tiny Greek island of Kythera, as ancestral home, has exerted its influence a world away on prolific artist and writer John Conomos.
Conomos was born in Grafton (NSW) in 1947, a child of Kytheran émigré parents brought together by the ‘letter-chain mode of migration’ in Australia. His art practice is a crucible of mixed media, from single channel video and radiophonic works to hybrid forms of video art and documentary, installation, photomedia and photoperformance.
Labyrinthian and mercurial, Conomos’ works traverse the big themes: memory, time, cultural amnesia, the Greek diaspora, identity, aesthetic and cultural erasure, and the question of home. His; a form of writing in images and sounds.
