Anthony Discenza

Lives and works in Holyoke, MA

Artist statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the tensions between textual and visual systems of representation, with an emphasis on the ways that metanarratives embedded in technologic and representational systems shape experience in contemporary culture. Over three decades, my work has evolved through many phases, encompassing audio and video installation, post-conceptual sculpture, text-based work, AI-generated media, and collaborations with the film industry. Deeply informed by speculative literature and the legacy of conceptual art, my projects frequently employ strategies of appropriation, metafictional gestures that situate projects in a zone of narrative ambiguity, and the use of withheld information to direct viewers towards absent or imagined experiences. For the past several years, I’ve used the exhibition format itself as an unreliable arena, redirecting various tropes of post-conceptual art practice into an uncanny context that resonates against the increasingly catastrophic conditions we find ourselves in. Recent projects such as the exhibitions Dæmonomania (2024) and Folklore (2026), have focused on the ways operative metaphors arising from occult and supernatural belief inform the seemingly rational project of technology, from the harnessing of fossil fuels to the increasing use of computationally intensive tools such as AI. Since 2020, as a complement to my own practice, I also run the invitational artist residency/project space lower_cavity.

Artwork