Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Konstantin Dimopoulos. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Konstantin , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.

Public art installation reveals government has done little to reduce homelessness nationwide

The Purple Rain is a public art installation that I created that raised the issue about homelessness, The Purple Rain tells the stories of people whose lives have moved from the streets, uncertainty and extreme vulnerability and into jobs, academic learning and safe social environments. These are stories of abusive childhoods, disrupted education, undiagnosed mental illness, alcoholism, drug use, violence, loss and grief.
Using a combination of visual art with mobile technologies, I invite the viewer to engage with people who have experienced homelessness or extreme social disadvantage by reading their narratives. Hovering a smartphone with a QR scanner over the QR code on a purple dot with a person’s name will take the viewer directly to their story, told in the first person. For those without a mobile scanner, the stories can be accessed directly through www.thepurplerain.net
This is art for social change. Without understanding what lies at the root of homelessness there can be no long-term way of solving the issue.
“The Purple Rain came about from when I created my environmental art installation, The Blue Trees in downtown Seattle,” . “I was colouring trees blue in a plaza area where the homeless congregated. Some were curious enough to ask me what I was doing and so we started to chat. I learned their names and their stories and they stopped being ‘homeless’ and became Bill, Mary, Joe or Scott.
“Many had lost their jobs during the global financial crisis. This had snowballed into losing their homes and families. The crisis had caused a downpour of homelessness and I realized that any of us can be faced with issues that could lead to losing our homes. I am told that the number of people who are homeless in Australia has changed little over the last decade which indicates that our social policies are not working. Other places are dealing effectively with helping homeless people move forward with their lives – Utah has reduced homeless by 75%, so perhaps the government should work directly with these places where the results have been spectacularly successful and copy their models.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a Greek artist, who was born in Egypt during the country’s tumultuous nationalisation in the 1950s. By the early 1960s my family was forced to leave this once culturally-diverse country to resettle in New Zealand, a young bicultural country suspicious of refugees.

My personal experiences as a stranger in a strange new land left an indelible desire for me to seek humanitarian change through my artwork. I graduated from Victoria University in Wellington with a degree in humanities then moved to London studying at the Chelsea School of Arts before returning to New Zealand to begin my art career.

My socially-engaged art practice has thematic and contextual constructions about domestic violence, migration, environmental ecocide, homelessness, and obsolescence.

I moved with my wife and four children from New Zealand to Australia in 2003 where the dense urban tree-scape was a counterpoint to stark images of global deforestation. This led to the creation of his ongoing environmental art installation, The Blue Trees where the community helps him temporarily transform urban trees into a provocative surreal blue landscape highlighting deforestation. To date, I have created this installation in more than 35 cities around the world. From 2022 through to end of 2023 it will be created in Austin Texas, Memphis, Tennessee and at the Peabody Essex Museum of Art in Salem, Massachusetts.

When creating The Blue Trees in a downtown plaza in Seattle, he met many homeless people who used the area to gather during the day. His engagement with them and hearing their stories led to his 2015 social art installation, The Purple Rain in Melbourne. I am looking for other cities to invest in highlighting the homeless.

Working with St Mary’s House of Welcome, the Australian Catholic University and STREAT, I interviewed people who had experienced homelessness. The Purple Rain used QR codes to reveal the narratives of these remarkable, resilient men and women, removing their anonymity and making them visible as individuals once again.

In 2016 I moved to the United States working out of studios first in Chattanooga, Tennessee then Brooklyn, New York. During his five years in the USA I created multiple installations of The Blue Trees and installed privately-funded sculptures in public places. I also was guest speaker at TED talk in Sacramento, on “Can art save the World”.

Installations such as Level 4 and Kroc and the Creation of the Big Byte, at public gallery and museum venues explored the ‘viral’ aspect within contemporary civilisation. The Blue Trees, an ongoing environmental art intervention, opened at the Vancouver Biennale in 2011 and since then has been realised around the United States, at the City of London arts festival 2013 when I created it outside St Paul’s Cathedral; and for the Vancouver Biennale following its success and ongoing public demand since 2011.

Given the issue with Covid over the past 3 years I am currently working on a new series of paintings and prints, as well as new sculptures. These will exhibited in my Metro Gallery, Melbourne, Australia and then coming to the US.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Never give up. We are all going to die that is a certainty. So I realised very early that anything else we need to do to realise our vision is nothing in comparison to death.

So make the calls you need to make, knock on the doors you need to open and don’t listen to the negative people that are constantly trying to bring you to a STOP.

My favourite quote which I have on my wall is from Theodore Roosevelt “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Stay in the ring and take the punches. Dare Greatly, so that at the end you will know Victory or Defeat.

Change is not an easy thing for us. We change mainly through either inspiration or desperation. But change we must. Take small steps every day focus on your next step and not where the journey will end. And enjoy the process. Remember if death is the worst thing to experience, then anything else should be a lot easier.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For me I don’t mind if people Love or Hate my work, because those are reactions that evokes an emotion. Art is about
For me art has always been an integral part of my genetic makeup. For me an artist is someone that knows nothing and is continually searching and asking questions. One of my environmental art installations The Blue Tree Project reflects that idea of asking questions, raising a flag and inviting discourse.

As artists we change our environment continually through our particular practice. Whether painting on canvas, creating sculptures or a digital artwork we take reality and alter it. The viewer then sees this altered world and translates it through their own experiences, through their own eyes, their baggage.

When I was completing the Blue Trees in Vancouver and all the equipment had been removed, the brushes cleaned and put away, and the color packed up, I was sitting on the ground after an exhausting day when I saw a mother and daughter walking along the path towards the trees.

On seeing the Blue Trees the girl immediately released herself from her mothers hand and rushed towards one of the trees, yelling “Mum, Mum, a blue tree, a blue tree.“

When she got there she threw her arms around the tree and gave it a big hug. The tree had, I may add, been there for a long time and I am sure the child had walked this way before but this time she saw the tree. For me something quite magical had happened.

I will always remember the little girl hugging the blue tree in Vancouver. I also hope that the memory will last with her for a long time. It’s like saying pink elephants – once you say it, it’s hard to get the image out of your mind.

Color moves us to a variety of emotions. It is a great antidote to greyness and inertia and dull acceptance. Color is an incredible powerful stimulant. The fact that blue is a color that is not naturally identified with trees suggests to people that something unusual, something out of the ordinary has happened. For me Blue suggests breathlessness and sacredness and a mystery.

Einstein knew the importance of the imagination. “Imagination” (he wrote) “is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” I was elated at the response of the child. The mother then walked over and broke the spell – removed the magic, removed the mystery.

In the sixties Joni Mitchell sang about the Tree Museum, in her Yellow Taxi song. Now we can visit Botanic gardens (Museums) to see seeds of trees that no longer exist in nature. They exist in catalogued boxes. From a song of the imagination in the 1960s, to a frightening reality in 30 years.

The Blue Trees takes an urban landscape with which you are familiar and changes it for a brief period of time so that it becomes something unfamiliar, a strange environment.

We are creatures who like certainty and we become disconcerted when our environment changes. Yet we have altered and destroyed or dirtied a huge part of our environment. With this destruction we have caused the extinction of countless species.

The Blue Trees is part of a wider question that I ask – Can Art Save The World? Maybe not on its own, but it can generate thinking and discussion throughout the global community.

Through The Blue Trees I wanted to create an artwork that was both real and surreal. Something that was both beautiful and fearful. In order to get people to see the forest I had to make the trees visible – not only visible but electric.

Trees are the lungs of the world. Without them we would not be able to breathe. This is the number one important issue we face today. When they go we too will all be leaving. I have always felt that there is something beautiful, majestic and mysterious about trees.

I will give Einstein the last words. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kondimopoulos.com
• Instagram: kondimopoulos
• Facebook: te Greko Kon dimopoulos
• Twitter: kondimopoulos

Image Credits
All credits belong to artist