Image courtesy of Tango7174 / Wikimedia Commons

 3quarksdaily.com | Article Link | by Jeff Strabone

Kristina Williamson is a multimedia visual artist who can find the erotic in a Cheese Curl, the surreal in the every day, and signs of globalization in the empty village left behind. Her photographs span the globe from her small-town origins somewhere in America to the islands of Greece and Spain. Like Byron's Childe Harold in the ruins of the Acropolis, her new book of photographs in Greece contemplates in the contradictions of modernity what endures of the past and what is 'Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were'. Her work alternates between domestic, global, eerie, surprising, revelatory, and beautiful—sometimes all in the same image. On the eve of her book's publication I caught up with the artist at her studio in Brooklyn to talk about the project and her new work, which she describes as 'the accidental surreal'.

Q: Your new book One Year on Kythera is a monograph of photos from a Greek island no one's ever heard of. Why Kythera and what is this strange vision you had there?

A: I've always been interested in rural communities having grown up in a small town. My first exposure to Greek culture was while living in the Greek precinct of Melbourne, Australia during a semester abroad. I was fascinated by the community's efforts to maintain a satellite of their homeland. So it was a combination of these two things that inspired my research into photographing in rural Greece

Q: But why Kythera specifically? How did you end up there?

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