Moving forward, experimenting, never ceasing to change or grow, that’s the basis of Charlotte-based artist Diana Arvanites’ work. Finding joy in incompleteness and seeing beauty in the ephemeral, Arvanites is a process-oriented artist. Her favorite part of art is the making. With a solid foundation of inspiration derived from her innate nature, her family’s nurture, and her self-professed bad taste, her artistic projects bring new awareness and rekindle sensory experiences for her viewers. 

With her father and uncle both scientists, Ms. Arvanites naturally took an interest in the subject. Her affinity for science manifested itself in her knack for mixing potions and executing medical illustrations. As a savvy ten year-old, she began a little trading business when she realized she could exchange her illustrations of the human heart and other organs for cookies, cootie catchers, and other such treasures. After her illustration trading days, she went on to receive a formal art education and then launched her career as a professional artist. She currently shows at the Center of the Earth Gallery and has a studio at the Hart-Witzen Gallery in NoDa. 

Arvanites doesn’t see the arts and sciences as separate academic arenas. As with her general aesthetic viewpoint, they’re two parts of a whole. In her work she accentuates opposites, focusing on the open and closed, positive and negative space, and linear and organic forms. Emptiness and fullness can be resting points where the viewer finds balance in her work. In fusing opposites together, she’s created her own style. “I build them together until they become mine,” she said gazing at an unfinished installation of organic nerve forms on the massive white wall in her studio. “[I want] to obliviate hierarchy,” she continues, “because one thing is not more important than the next.” 

What does this look like in her work? I visited Arvanites in her studio to take a look. In her current work-in-progress, Neuroblossoms Dancing in a Dreamscape Contemplating Different Ways to Organize the Metaphysical Flux (figure 1), she pulls inspiration from the human central nervous system–the curvilinear forms of nerves, the connections at small synapses and the open spaces between nerve endings that build a complex network that makes human beings sense, feel, and be alive.

The detail photograph (figure 2) shows a special moment in the flow across her wall where the three-dimensional spider-like dendrites stretch to conjoin with the flat drawings of similar subject matter. Arvanites has built a 3-D/2-D representation of human nerves. One flows into the other as if they are really one and the same entity. 

On a purely formal level, Arvanites’ work incorporates several different media into one piece. The work described above is simultaneously sculpture, drawing, and painting. It is two-dimensional and three-dimensional. It extends from one wall to another and crawls from the floor up the wall. Clusters of activity punctuate still spaces. Negative space garners interest just as much as the positive ones. While there are resting places for the eyes and the mind, Arvanites manages to keep the viewer challenged, activated, and alert. 

Walking away from the art, I was struck by how present I was in both my mind and body while viewing her creations. Mentally I was connecting the spaces and clusters to my own experiences. At times, I saw Andy Warhol’s poppies, then daddy long-leg spiders. Simultaneously, I was reminded of my art history studies and then of days at summer camp squealing about the scary giant arachnids. Physically, I was aware of my body and the nerves crawling through my skin, my brain, and my organs. I could feel the synapses firing at lightening speed sending electric messages up and down my spine. 

Most people don’t think their body in its most basic anatomical make-up. Arvanites’ art tries to bring viewers to a whole new level of awareness in many different senses of the word. You become aware of how science and art overlap and play with another. You become aware of the inner workings that make you function. You become aware of the energy that colliding opposites create. This awareness is the function of all true art. 

It may be that Arvanites’ work holds a key to unlocking Charlotte’s artistic potential. It invites viewers to think about themselves as compilations of their most basic elements. Those elements come together in a unique way–the positive, negative, and everything in between. Charlotte is similarly unique – a conglomeration of each citizen who lives here and unlike any other city on earth. In Ms. Arvanites’ opinion, Charlotte’s art community is “growing in a positive direction but has growing pains.” Because Charlotte is such a business-oriented city, she says many people view life through a financial lens and it’s hard to engage them artistically. There is little self-exploration and self-growth in Charlotte, perhaps due to the fact that there is not enough exposure to the arts. Since she moved here three years ago, Arvanites has witnessed some progress but still wants Charlotteans to see that art can be for everyone. She summed it up when she said, “Once Charlotte stops wanting to be another place and embraces Charlotte, we’ll be good.”