Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

Athena Tasiopoulos

It starts with an old photograph. When artist Athena Tasiopoulos looks at the black-and-white faces of strangers in old portraits, she feels “an obligation to free them,” she writes on her website. So she cuts the faces from their context and embellishes them with pencil, watercolor and acrylic. These composite images make up a show called “Transcend” at Capitol Grounds in Montpelier, December 1 through 30. “The unsettling knowledge that most of my subjects are no longer living creates a heavy finality in their expressions and gestures,” Tasiopoulos writes. “They possess a sad quietness, beautifully captured in an interesting sort of limbo — simultaneously trapped and saved.” Pictured: “Clarity.”