Christos J. Palios (b. 1979)

Christos Palios is a lens-based fine-artist residing in Maryland. As a first-generation Greek-American, Palios' perspectives were shaped by two disparate and fascinating cultures. The artist's practice is born from a wellspring of inspiration among themes of memory, connection, and identity, consummated by intimate examinations of history, architecture, and socioeconomics. Employing multifaceted approaches rooted in research and with an appreciation of metaphorical and physical space, the artist's photographs evoke cogent, palpable awareness through distinct, cohesive narratives and aesthetics. 

His springboard originates in the visual arts with a BFA from the University of Maryland. Christos' work has been recognized through numerous awards, publications, and exhibitions throughout the nation and abroad. Venues include the Baltimore Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery, Grimaldis Gallery, the Houston Center for Photography, among others. Among awards and publications, he is a 2022 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 artist, a winner of longstanding Communication Arts' 2023 Photography Annual, while his work has been featured in Musée, Dodho, and Aspire Design and Home Magazines, shortlisted for the Athens Photo Festival, and longlisted finalist for the Aesthetica Art Prize. The artist's photographs can be found in private and corporate collections throughout the U.S.A.

Artist Statements

Conversations Series:

A shared meal reveals tradition and offers windows into culture, provides discourse, and speaks to identity. Personal electronic devices have rapidly modified our communal experiences.  

Our new paradigm of exchange, a routine of frequently consulting screen-tech, has become accepted and customary. We retreat into self-imposed, momentary bubbles of curation, oftentimes while in the presence of others. This new dichotomy is particularly observed among the time-honored and intimate surfaces where we break bread daily.  

For this series, I contemplate the indomitable implications technology has on human interaction by documenting personal meals shared with friends and family. Evoking the Dutch Golden Age genre of still-life painting as an aesthetic foundation, I intend these photographs as contemporary anecdotal counterparts representing the frenetic, hyper-convenient, always-connected, consumerist epoch of instant gratification.

Isolation Games Series:

At the dawn of 2020, universal freedoms were renegotiated as the world receded into quarantine. Lifestyles were fraught with apprehension surrounding social implications of an unapologetic threat among our collective future. We promptly discovered detachment drastically shifts routine and tests psychology. Humanity's fragile inter-connectedness amid a surreal stillness became a germane allegory of solidarity and perseverance in an uncertain world.  

With natural light befitting mood, each tabletop represents distraction and amusement, a need seemingly amplified in a skewed world. As pastimes rooted in tradition, like mythology and literature, games are cultural agents for human experience—the zeitgeist of societies. While passing the time at home during isolation, on an old coffee table where memories abound, games cultivated safety, intimacy, and warmth among limited human presence.  

As serendipitous surrogates to customary social interactions, these moments hearkened back to a seemingly lost tradition, to nostalgic times from which I've reassessed valued relationships and my habitual approach to daily life. I grew intrigued by items, surface textures, and backgrounds encompassing an adjusted at-home mindset, a meditative glimpse of indirect portraiture. Reflecting upon and freshly embracing what essentially matters in this paused, ambiguous arc of time, has suddenly come into sharp[er] focus.