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Dimitri Papatheodorou

Dimitri Papatheodorou is an artist, musician and architect pursuing hybrid forms of expression through painting, sculpture, sound and architecture. Born in Toronto, he is Adjunct Faculty at Ryerson University and operates from a rural studio in Warkworth Ontario. 


In music and performance, Papatheodorou is known as ‘The John Cleats’.

Visual Artist, Architect, Musician
Represented by Elan Fine Art, Vancouver
Represented by Hatch Gallery, Prince Edward County
Represented by the James Baird Gallery, Newfoundland
Adjunct Faculty: Ryerson University DAS, 2005-present
Bachelor of Environmental Studies 1987
Bachelor of Architecture 1989, OAA MRAIC.
Board Member (2020-) Art Gallery of Northumberland, Ontario
Past Chair & Founding Board Member: Arts & Heritage Centre, Warkworth Ontario
Past Board Member: Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto

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The Parthenon Marbles are original parts of the Parthenon and other sacred and ceremonial structures built on the Acropolis of Athens in the 5th century BCE. From   to 1812, the Earl of Elgin removed about half of the sculptures of the Acropolis, and had them transported by sea to Britain. Currently, the Acropolis Museum in Athens displays a portion of the complete frieze, aligned in orientation and within sight of the Parthenon, with the position of the missing elements clearly marked and space left when they are

re-patriated to Athens.

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In the first half of the last century the predominant form of architectural research and thought focused on the global problem of housing. Today, we are in a similar housing crisis; war, climate and scarcity are the source of a migratory crisis that is just surfacing around the world. The devastation at Notre-Dame de Paris symbolizes our collective vulnerability, through architecture. The original spire, in its medieval context represented man’s attempt to reach the heavens. Today’s spire reaches across the earth itself, the realm of the mortal god, destroyed by person-kind. It is not a spear to the heart of god, but a hug for Gaia. If the Cathedral was once a house for the immortal God, the fire in 2019 made clear the mortality of this endeavour. It should be remade into the House of the Un-housed, for the people who walk the earth without, as Christ once did, and for the descendants of Mary Magdalene, of Esmeralda. The reconstruction can embody the lessons gleaned from the fall of the Tower of Babel; we do not spiral upward, but forward, to tomorrow through yesterday. It as an opportunity to complete Constant’s (New Babylon) vision, of a Paris rising from the ashes of itself and freeing itself in a cloud over the urban-scape.

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The Ether Currency artwork brings into question the materiality of money. Currency as a belief structure forms a contract between transactional parties. The mining of crypto currency requires energy and therefore contains mass (expended materiality).

Marshall MacLuhan explains that new technological environments are ‘cast in the molds of the preceding technology’ (i.e., gold/coins/dollars). This Ether Currency is a representation of a representation, a simulacra of paper money.

10 Cents.jpg

In Praise of Shadows :
Musings on the Materiality of Light

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