Antonia Kuo

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

My practice centers around recording, translation, and the potential of the photographic medium. I am interested in how images and materials are alchemically transformed through technology and the hand, how seemingly unquantifiable sources like light can be converted and shaped into image. Working with transmutative materials and processes, I am able to collaborate with active modes of becoming, chance operations, and the unknown. Paintings on silver gelatin paper are sensitive skins vigorously built up in layers of experimental photochemical processing and painting with dyes and toners. They are indexical records of drawings and photographs, found objects, trace bodily actions. These varied impressions form a dense landscape of color, shape and pattern, each subsequent layer obliterating an earlier gesture only to reveal a new cosmos or terrain. The resultant paintings foreground the unknowable or unseeable, while collapsing the concepts of past and present into one phenomenological surface. In being physical and direct with the picture plane, I hope to bring our focus back to the inherent materiality and mutability of the image. My sculptures experimentally adopt industrial mold making and investment casting processes, a recording technology that shares analogues with the photographic medium. The hollow mold sculptures are high fidelity recordings of wax forms that have been melted out of the ceramic shell—a negative matrix that corresponds to a lost or obscured...

Artwork