In her photographs ELENI MYLONAS makes rubble-covered rags look like the draperies on the Nike of Samothrace. The back of a nude torso becomes a Greek sculpture, a series of doorways is transformed into a tomb at Mycenae. Her eye finds the formal beauty of ancient Greece at its most glorious in the least of the modern world's visual material graffiti, the rubble of abandoned buildings and empty lots, and, recently, wrecked automobiles. She was trained in photo-journalism, and thus her eye is naturally drawn to the "story" behind the appearance. 

The series of pictures of Ellis Island is an essay about emigrating to America, minus the immigrants. Every broken window sash, empty chair, and dust covered cot and mattress speaks eloquently of the anxious days spent in confinement there while the immigrants desperately desired freedom remained unobtainable. 

The crunched fenders and shattered mirrors of automobiles are equally voluble about the lives and deaths of their former owners. Complicating the surfaces of her huge CC-Prints with the application of oil paint she adds layers of meaning to already loaded subject matter. In the pictures a giant grinning mouth of red upholstery filled with glittering "teeth" of broken glass is like the smile of Gorgon's head. In other, broken glass and mirror fragments reflect a brilliant blue sky no longer visible to the crash victim or the glow of flesh that will never feel the sun's warmth again. 

Besides adding paint, she has begun to incorporate her photographs into three-dimensional installations. "Working with a variety of mediums", she says, "I feel freer and no longer earthbound. By allowing the concrete and the abstract, the visible and the invisible, the impermanent and the permanent, 'this and THAT' to coexist, I attempt to create a mirror of my own perception."

 April Kingsley, New York City, August 1990