Through painting, drawing, and photography, Anastasia Pavlou constructs a visual vocabulary to explore ways of looking and of seeing, creating an atlas for how these ways are made manifest in images.

Pavlou’s work departs from collage, first as a way of constructing an image and then as a way of thinking around images, their relationships, and how they come together in space. Her way of making runs parallel to her way of thinking—continuously asking how one can judge the present by looking at the debris of the everyday and the close by. In answering that question, Pavlou creates a narrow but important trajectory for how it looks to have had in fact, for an abstract amount of time, passed through space and time.

Often leaning on literature, she tends to inhabit space through symbolic thinking, where the meaning of one thing lies in the metaphor of another. Like the words that make up a sentence—which are unique in their meaning and associations but once placed in relation to other words in a given sentence, are transformed to hold a collective meaning while contributing to it essentially—the essence of Pavlou’s practice lies within each work in equal measure.