The Sum of Its Parts

Phillip J. Capuano and Eleftheria Lialios

Press Release

In collaboration with Linda Warren Projects, Kerrigan Arts is pleased to present its inaugural “pop-up” exhibition. “A Sum of Its Parts” features select work by two distinguished Chicago artists, Phillip J. Capuano, and Eleftheria Lialios. Capuano is primarily known as a sculptor, though also a documentary filmmaker and photographer, and Lialios is a well-established photographer, filmmaker, image-maker, and educator. For over five decades, these artists have pushed the boundaries of their practices. 

Utilizing their well-honed skills, both artists tempt and explore their mediums’ alchemistic qualities and nature, successfully shifting certain pre-established norms into unchartered territory. The sensitivities of their visual languages originate from their remarkable life experiences and unique personal concerns. Known as innovators and warriors, their labor-intensive approaches stem from their remarkable life experiences and circumstances. Not surprisingly, they have continued uninterruptedly in devotion to their art making in the face of adversity and turmoil. This brief weekend presentation hopes to raise awareness of these artists’ historical importance and value. It is crucial to bolster their ability to continue building their lifework.

Capuano’s sculptures are an amalgamation of found objects combined with his clay creations, often using kiln breakage or discarded pottery as pieces to assemble into new objects and installations. Capuano’s affinity for the tchotchkes and vernacular ephemera of the world around him imbues his work with an “outsider” aesthetic. However, his pieces’ “intuitive” nature is balanced with a highly trained, impeccable technique. His prophetic dreams and real-life events inspire most of Capuano’s work. These metaphorical artworks stand in for and narrate Capuano’s many extraordinary lives, some of which include: a competitive weightlifter, semi-pro baseball player, and professional astrologer. 

Philip J. Capuano received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Maryland Institute of Art and his Master’s from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977. Capuano has exhibited in Chicago, Maryland, and the New York state area throughout his artistic career. Capuano tried out for the Chicago White Sox at 31 and entered state and national weightlifting competitions at 52.

Lialios, born in Ioannina, Greece, immigrated to Canada and the United States with her parents – Greek refugees from Albania. Selling peanuts and popcorn in the streets of Toronto and Detroit at an early age, Lialios soon developed an intense interest in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, focusing her undergraduate studies in these disciplines. She completed her MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985. She came to still photography after a video documenting primates at the Detroit Zoo in the early ’70s. She found that how human action could be represented and recorded within a psychological, analytical context was critical and fascinating.  

She has made one of the most insistent concerns of her production the socio-political implications and powers of photographic work. While simultaneously looking externally into the world, she is also a keen personal observer and identifier of her on history. In several works we will show, you will see how she has used herself or her daughter as representations within the narrative.

To describe Lialios’ evolution in image-making as innovative and experimental is to understate her achievements, which must be stressed. On display will be a range of her work, from the 1970s to the present, covering periods of black and white, as well as saturated colorful documentary photography, large-scale color transparencies that take on the physical presence of sculpture and have often been used to create large scale interactive installations to her most recent work – the “Bird Boxes.” It must be noted that all of her work, throughout her oeuvre, has been wholly hand-produced and developed, and the notion of computer or digital manipulation is obsolete. 

The “Bird Boxes” – many of which will be on display- are spectacular sculptures containing transparencies developed of birds and insects that came to her home’s bird feeders during Covid. The birds were welcomed visitors during this quiet, lonely time, and LiaIios could observe and document their daily behavior, like in her earliest works at the Zoo with the primates. At the same time, she was self-contained and isolated at home. 

Lialios has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. Her works are in the permanent collections of the J Paul Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography in Thessaloniki, Greece, and the Hellenic Museum in Chicago.