Online Assignment #6

Artist: Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni was born in Freeports, Bahamas in 1964. She later earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 1986, and received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. She currently lives and works in New York, New York. Her work borders the line between performance art and what sculpture is, with exhibits involving one or the other. Her favorite tool is using her own body in her artwork. For example, to make sculptures, an example being "Lick and Lather", she made faces of soap busts in her appearance. An example of her performance art is in the video "Touch". She looks as if she's walking on the surface of water, which is an impossible feat but something accomplished with training for eight months to walk on the tightrope involved. She strung the rope at the exact level where the horizon is to create this illusion. At one of her solo exhibitions labeled "Within" at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she has numerous sculptures. The work there was inspired by something she has a fascination with - "milagros". Milagros are found in Portugal, Spain, Mexico, and Brazil and are small religious charms. Milagros can be small medallions, flat, in the shapes of body parts but also three dimensional. These often take the place of an ailing part of your body, for example, if you had a problem with your foot, you'd buy a foot. You would bring the milagros to church and have it hung from the ceiling. These ceilings would then be full of body parts. In the same video that talks about this exhibition and her fascination with milagros, she displays a sculpture of coccyx bone combined with a hand underneath it. This is unusual and impossible to actually occur but Antoni wanted to combine them together. She did this by grafting resin body parts together and the sculptures in the "Within" exhibit were combined/fused together pieces that had been sanded for days and days. Her goal with this exhibition was for you to imagine how they were made. In making her artwork, she wants to somehow find herself in relation to others and the environment. If her work resonates with someone, she doesn't feel as alone or as strange as she usually feels.

"Lick and Lather" sculpture

In the video "Touch"

Her sculpture

From the Loving Care performance