Janine Antoni (born January 19, 1964) is a Bahamian–born American artist, who creates contemporary work in performance art, sculpture, and photography.
Antoni's work focuses on process and the transitions between the making and finished product, often portraying feminist ideals.
[2] She is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery, NY, and Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco.
[22] In her work Gnaw (1992), Antoni used her mouth to bite, chew, and carve the corners and edges of two 600 lb (300 kg) cubes,[23] one made of chocolate and the other of lard.
Washing, bathing, and eating are indulgent, self-loving acts, and in her destruction of her own image using these methods she explores the love/hate relationship that we have with ourselves.
Antoni states, "I didn't want to leave it as part of the piece because, for me, the licking was very important, in the sense that it was a very loving act, very different than Gnaw".
[28] The soap has been interpreted by some as a symbol of the societal expectations placed on women, as they are required to be "clean" in a metaphorical and literal sense.
She spent the first weeks sleeping in the gallery space, a room with no decor, filled only by a wire-frame bed and a desk with a computer and wires.
In Conduit (2009), Janine Antoni transforms a copper gargoyle into a sculptural tool that allows her to urinate while standing, equating her body with architectural form.
Drawing inspiration from the mythical griffin, Antoni's hybrid device evokes both plumbing and architectural elements, with the oxidized copper bearing the physical traces of her performative act.
[2] It visually resembles the second stage in childbirth called, "crowning", when the baby's head is surrounded by the vaginal orifice.
Small photographs, close-ups of living bodies, are presented in gilded frames shaped to look like human bones.
[36] The work speaks to the fragility of the human form, surrounded as it was by the remains of some 560,000 individuals buried at Green-Wood, one of the earliest examples of a large park-like and varied in style cemetery, built in rural America.