Mein Spielplatz, Schulträume and Die Turnhalle

In his series Mein Spielplatz (my playground),  Schulträume (dreams of school days) and Die Turnhalle (the gym), Spiros Margaris revisits the spaces that he occupied as a child and attempts to freeze the images and memories of his childhood and adolescence before they are lost forever.  Surprisingly, the physical spaces have changed little over the years.  Yet, he has changed, and he explores his new relationship, both physical and emotional, to the playground, schoolroom, gym and schoolyard scenes that were once part of his daily reality.  

The first step in his exploration is the image of these childhood and adolescent scenes as they now exist without him, and, indeed, devoid of any of their usual inhabitants, the children, the parents, the teachers, etc.  The artist’s childhood memories start to flow as he looks upon and becomes an active participant in these once familiar scenes, very much as the childhood memories of author Marcel Proust were triggered years later by the taste of a rusk cracker dipped in tea.

His photographs of empty playgrounds, classrooms and schoolyards are virtually universally familiar scenes of every person’s youth and yet evoke in each viewer the wholly unique remembrances of his or her childhood and adolescence.  As Spiros Margaris, and the viewer, looks upon these empty, or objective, images, he fills in the scene with his own memories.

He then moves from the psychological to the physical by occupying these same spaces, challenging and synthesizing his memories with a new reality.  The images of the artist as he physically penetrates these spaces are a revelation, a complete transformation and personalization of the objective images.  He moves in these spaces as he did when he was a child or youth but now as an adult figure - an aging process manifested not only by his physical size but by the suit and eyeglasses donned by the artist - and with his new adult body comes a new perspective and relationship to these spaces. 

The photographs are the combination of a crisp and logical reality and the soft beauty and lyricism of a memory or dream, with all its incongruity.