Janine Antoni was born
in Freeport, Bahamas in 1964. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence
College in New York, and earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School
of Design in 1989. Antoni’s work blurs the distinction between
performance
art and sculpture. Transforming everyday activities such as eating,
bathing, and sleeping into ways of making art, Antoni’s primary
tool for making sculpture has always been her own body. She has
chiseled cubes of lard and chocolate with her teeth, washed away
the faces of soap busts made in her own likeness, and used the brainwave
signals recorded while she dreamed at night as a pattern for weaving
a blanket the following morning. In the video, “Touch,”
Antoni appears to perform the impossible act of walking on the surface
of water. She accomplished this magician’s trick, however,
not through divine intervention, but only after months of training
to balance on a tightrope that she then strung at the exact height
of the horizon line. Balance is a key component in the related piece,
“Moor,” where the artist taught herself how to make a
rope out of unusual and often personal materials donated by friends
and relatives. By learning to twist the materials together so that
they formed a rope that was neither too loose nor too tight, Antoni
created an enduring life-line that united a disparate group of people
into a unified whole. Antoni has had major exhibitions of her work
at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, S.I.T.E. Santa Fe, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
The recipient of several prestigious awards including a John D.
and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1998 and the Larry Aldrich
Foundation Award in 1999, Janine Antoni currently resides in New
York.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York
Janine Antoni on the Art21 blog |
