Janine Antoni
| Janine Antoni | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 19, 1964 Freeport, Bahamas |
| Education |
Sarah Lawrence College, Rhode Island School of Design |
| Known for |
Sculpture, Installation art |
Janine Antoni (born January 19, 1964, in Freeport, Bahamas) is a contemporary artist, who creates work in performance art, sculpture, and photography. Antoni's works focus mostly on process and the transitions between the making and finished product. She often uses her body, as an entity or paying particular attention to body parts as tools, utilizing her mouth, hair, eyelashes, and, through technological scanning, the brain, to perform everyday activities to create her artwork. Her work blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture.
Antoni graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a BA, and from the Rhode Island School of Design with an MFA in 1989. She was a 1998 MacArthur Fellow and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.
In her work Gnaw (1992), Antoni uses her mouth and the activity of eating or chewing to carve two 600 lb (300 kg) cubes, one made of chocolateand the other of lard.She used the chewed out bits to create chocolate boxes and lipstick tubes, which she then displayed in a mock store front. Antoni made a statement about her work saying "Lard is a stand-in for the female body, a feminine material, since females typically have a higher fat content than males, making the work somewhat cannibalistic". In this work and others, Antoni often confronts issues such as materiality, process, the body, cultural perceptions of femininity, and her art historical roots.
In Loving Care (1993), Antoni uses her hair as a paintbrush and Loving Care hair dye as her paint. Antoni dips her hair in a bucket of hair dye and mops the gallery floor on her hands and knees and in the process pushes the viewers out of the gallery space. In this process Antoni explores the body, as well as themes of power, femininity, and the style of abstract expressionism. Her performance was at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, in 1993.
...
Wikipedia