About the Artist

Patricia Christakos is a visual artist and writer who uses photography and moving image to explore mythology, domesticity, and other gendered tales. She received her MFA in Media Arts from Maine Media College, Rockport, Maine in 2020 and lives in central New York and southwest Florida.

Artist Statement

The Sleepover examines the nature of time and memory, specifically girlhood time–that fluid, transitory phase that occurs pre-adulthood. For me, the remembered ritual of sleepovers epitomizes the energy and potency of this liminal, emotional space. This is not just how the memory of a sleepover looks but also how a sleepover feels under one girl’s skin. The photographs reflect a dual-projection video installation that I created for my MFA thesis.  

By creating these stills, I play with what filmmaker Barbara Hammer calls, the “simultaneity of time”, the concept that the present moment interacts with “everything else that we’ve ever done in our lives.” Using a wide variety of found and original footage, I layer my personal narrative with subversive cultural references to feminism and gender politics. Hammer’s use of domestic objects in Maya Deren’s Sink (2011) was an important influence on this work.

For my project, a four-poster single bed acts as my canvas and muse.