SOPHIA HATZIKOS
Sophia Hatzikos researches through swimming, letting the perspective from the water shape observations of a landscape. Through sculptural tools, site-responsive gestures, and field interviews, Hatzikos attempts to translate fleeting moments of lived experience into objects. Often making from a distance, Hatzikos attempts to recall place through sensorial memory. Personal experience and histories of place intertwine to question how human alterations to landscape shape perception.
Zestí
Drawing on the metaphoric potential of water and atmosphere to suggest different mental states, Sophia Hatzikos creates art that navigates the intertidal zone between embodied experience and distanced observation. Zestí is both an inquiry into a real location—Finikas and Malaki Greece— and the intangible understanding of a place that emerges from personal reflection. Exploring the complex emotions that arise from being a temporary visitor in one’s familial homeland, Hatzikos’ work probes the boundaries of in/out and voyeurism/submersion by connecting these feelings to the built and natural environment.
The sculptural objects presented here are often made to resemble familiar forms—a pool ladder, a sink, a ceiling fan, a stained-glass window, a cluster of clay pipes. Together, these materials evoke the circulation of air and water through domestic infrastructure; a rhythm of outside and inside. But they also ask: at what point does the relationship between infrastructure and environment become unsettled? Where do we feel most at home?
Zestí is a Greek term referring to an all-pervasive heat, meaning more than just the quantifiable temperature; it captures the feeling of air and atmosphere on the body. Simultaneously a play on the citrus-associated word “zesty,” the title of Zestí evokes both a torrid intensity and a longing for its relief through refreshment. The two video-works in the show further intensify this longing by referencing the cooling air and water of the sea. Both express a desire to be submerged in the elements, to understand and be understood by them. But in doing so, we become unmoored from the stable quality of the land. In this way, we are invited to consider the creative potential of uncertainty, of being in between states of existence.
In this installation, Hatzikos contemplates the sensation of a place that becomes familiarized and defamiliarized in a circuitous rhythm akin to the elemental cycles that regulate our lives. Like the currents in our bodies, water and atmosphere are in a constant state of flux. In a similar vein, Hatzikos’ work foregrounds the ebb and flow of belonging as a necessarily unresolved source of meaning.
Exhibition Text by Jillian Lepek
2025
2024
2023