In Alien Hand, artists Alison Blickle (Los Angeles) and Irini Karayannopoulou (Athens) converge in a dialogue between divinity and embodiment. Borrowing its title from the neurological condition in which one's hand acts seemingly of its own accord, the exhibition unfolds as an exploration of artistic possession - a state in which creation appears guided by an unseen intelligence, a higher or inner force that feels at once intimate and foreign.
Here, the "alien" is not extraterrestrial but intraterrestrial: a visitor from the depths of the self arrives unannounced, paralyzing for an instant the will to control.
Across the distance between Los Angeles and Athens, Blickle and Karayannopoulou join forces in an act of painterly sisterhood; a transcontinental communion rooted in shared mythologies and a mutual devotion to the feminine image. Both artists are steeped in a common iconology of mythic bodies, oracles, avatars, and phantoms, yet each channels these archetypes through her own material and rhythm. There is a sense of exchange running through the exhibition - not collaboration in the literal sense, but a resonance across distance. Gestures echo, forms reappear in altered states, and painting becomes both an act of devotion and a testing ground, serious without being solemn.
Though separated by oceans, their gestures seem to resonate across frequencies - playful, intuitive, intense, and imbued with an undercurrent of rebellion. Theirs is a sisterhood wave that merges joy and rigor, invocation and experimentation, the devotional act of painting with the ecstatic charge of freedom.
The exhibition proposes the studio as a site of visitation. In this context, the artist becomes medium and the painting surface a field for encounters with forces that exceed comprehension. Within this immersive constellation of images, Alien Hand reframes authorship as trance, the act of painting as an invitation to the unknown. In the tension between control and release, sacred and profane, Alison Blickle and Irini Karayannopoulou reveal the alien not as foreign but as the deepest articulation of the self.
