Antonia Wright

2021 print collaboration with Antonia Wright featuring the still image seen above from her video And so with ends comes beginnings.Locust Projects featured the original video on a floating video barge at UNTITLED Art Fair’s VIP Opening on Monday, November 29, 2021 from 4-6pm.

Shot when the Miami-based artist was 9 months pregnant, the video of a disappearing pregnant belly in a silver sea reflects the dualities of ecstasy and anxiety of living in a paradise with ground zero sea-level rise. A visual metaphor for simultaneous creation and destruction—And so with ends comes beginnings is an emblem of fecundity in times of erasure of the natural order.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Through video, performance, photography, and sculpture, my work responds to extremes of emotion, control, and violence as it relates to systems of power in society. With a poetic sensibility and profound attention to aesthetic detail, I respond to the brutal realities seen through the mediated image by using the human body in extreme, sometimes aggressive and logistically dangerous gestures as a visceral sublimation. By questioning social norms through physical actions I set up dichotomies; violence and humor, fear and formal beauty — that ultimately achieve a fusion of ecstasy and anxiety. Learn more about the artist here.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Antonia Wright is a Cuban-American artist born in Miami, Florida. Wright received her MFA in Poetry from The New School in New York City in 2005 as well as at the International Center of Photography for photo and video in 2008. She has exhibited in the U.S. and abroad and has been awarded artist’s residencies both nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include shows at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), The Perez Art Museum (Miami), Pioneer Works (New York), The Faena Arts Center (Buenos Aires, Argentina), The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Spinello Projects (Miami, FL), Luis de Jesus Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries (SF, CA), Aeroplastics (Brussels, Belgium), The National Gallery of Art (Nassau, Bahamas), and Ping Pong (Basel, Switzerland). In April 2012, she became and founded the first artist-in-residence at the Lotus House Shelter for women and children in Overtown, Miami. She was recently named a CINTAS Foundation Fellowship finalist for 2019 in Visual art. She is represented by Spinello Projects in Miami, FL and affiliated with Luis De Jesus Gallery Los Angeles.

Wright’s work has been presented in publications including The New York Times, Artforum’s Critics’ Picks, Art In America, Hyperallergic, i-D, New York Magazine, Daily News, Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and The Art Newspaper.