Throw back your head and sip from the bowl of your own breast. Wear your mother’s pelvic bones as a collar. Become a snake, intertwining your spine with another and crawl across a woven rug. Let your head melt through your lover’s chest and listen for their heart. Embrace someone so fully that your ribs weave to become one.
From the Vow Made is a solo exhibition by Janine Antoni presented at Luhring Augustine. The show includes a collection of seven sculptural works and a video collaboration with choreographer Stephen Petronio.
For the past seven years, Antoni has turned to dance and movement for her inspiration. She has engaged in several somatic movement practices to further her exploration into what it means to live from an embodied place. These new works emerge from her somatic revelations and her study of milagros, sculptural votive offerings used in latin cultures. Ranging from body parts to domestic objects, milagros are often hung in churches as symbols of things in life requiring prayer, healing and protection. Antoni’s milagros are prayers for embodiment.
In unusual meetings, Antoni grafts the inside of the body to the outside of the body to the environment of the body. Through these marriages, psychological space turns physical. These artworks depict an impossible touch made possible. The translucent objects are created with a purposeful erasure of detail, a memory half remembered.
Moving from the dusty and ghostly world of the milagros, to a sensual and visceral womb, Antoni and Petronio present their video installation, Honey Baby. Inspired by motion in utero, the video captures a folding and tumbling body suspended in a honey filled environment.
Honey Baby is one of many collaborations between Antoni and Petronio. Presently, Antoni, Petronio, choreographer Anna Halprin, and scholar Adrian Heathfield are creating a new, collaborative body of work through the Artist-in-Residence Program of The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) in Philadelphia. This project, which received major support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, will premiere at FWM in 2016.
Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. She has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, S.I.T.E. Santa Fe, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the 1993 Venice Biennale, among many others. Antoni is the recipient of several prestigious awards including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1998, the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1999, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2011, a 2012 Creative Capital Artist Grant, and and the 2014 Anonymous Was A Woman award.
