ANTONIA KUO
Born 1987, New York, NY.
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Antonia Kuo creates complex, multimedia works that challenge, or intentionally misuse, conventional methods of registering images. As our media-based contemporary culture becomes increasingly disconnected from linear record-keeping, Kuo’s object-based artworks, via analog methods or chemical applications, operate as mechanisms for recording the movement of light, time, and process, and the cultural histories embedded therein.
While the digital space seems to be increasingly expanding and encroaching on our physical lives, as more and more of our world is mediated through pixels and on screens, Antonia Kuo explores the nature of these modes of re-representation, exposing the perhaps surprisingly similar fundamental workings of analog and digital processes. On a molecular and microscopic level, our technological communications and socializations, comprised of pixels on glass, operate in the same ways as our everyday concrete events.
Kuo is fascinated by outmoded technologies, and how our seismic cultural shifts are undergirded by similar evolutions in material production. Through the intentional misapplication of older photographic processing techniques, the artist is able to actively engage with the production of the image, tweaking chemical developments to coax colors and hues from the mercurial gelatin paper. By inserting herself in between phases of image production, Kuo takes an active role in shaping how elusive elements and energies are harnessed to record shapes and sounds that we recognize as images.
“I am interested in how images are recorded, translated, transformed through technology and the hand, how seemingly unquantifiable sources like light or electricity can be converted and shaped into image. I make objects that act as recording or encapsulating devices for time, light, materials and process.”
While the digital space seems to be increasingly expanding and encroaching on our physical lives, as more and more of our world is mediated through pixels and on screens, Antonia Kuo explores the nature of these modes of re-representation, exposing the perhaps surprisingly similar fundamental workings of analog and digital processes. On a molecular and microscopic level, our technological communications and socializations, comprised of pixels on glass, operate in the same ways as our everyday concrete events.
Kuo is fascinated by outmoded technologies, and how our seismic cultural shifts are undergirded by similar evolutions in material production. Through the intentional misapplication of older photographic processing techniques, the artist is able to actively engage with the production of the image, tweaking chemical developments to coax colors and hues from the mercurial gelatin paper. By inserting herself in between phases of image production, Kuo takes an active role in shaping how elusive elements and energies are harnessed to record shapes and sounds that we recognize as images.
“I am interested in how images are recorded, translated, transformed through technology and the hand, how seemingly unquantifiable sources like light or electricity can be converted and shaped into image. I make objects that act as recording or encapsulating devices for time, light, materials and process.”
Detail views of Spawn. Photos by Elisabeth Bernstein.
Antonia Kuo is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, film, sculpture, drawing, painting, and printmaking. She recieved an MFA from Yale University, her BFA from School of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University, and a one-year certificate from the School of the International Center of Photography under the Alan L. Model Grant. Antonia was awared the Robert and Stephanie Olmsted Award as a MacDowell Colony fellow, as well as fellowships at Mass MoCA, The Banff Centre, Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Vermont Studio Center and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. Her was has exhibited internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Eyebeam, Microscope Gallery, Pioneer Works, and the Knockdown Center in New York; the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal; and the West Bund Art Fair in Shanghai, among others. Her work is in private collections and the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Pompidou.