antonia contro

Artist Statement

My work considers the nature of knowledge, how it is conveyed, and what “knowing” is. I am interested in the relationship between common ways of distributing knowledge—words or data—and the intuitive, often subliminal, ways we construct what we know to be true.

In this age of immediate and pervasive digital information that we most often access in isolation, I am passionate about the knowledge we attain through our senses, as well as art’s capacity to connect us to each other and community.

Everything that I make begins as a drawing, modest in materials and scale, typically contained in a sketchbook. These books are my laboratories. Images and ideas within them provoke deeper investigations—collage, animation, light, sound—which often evolve into layered and expansive installations and multidisciplinary projects and collaborations.

My site-specific exhibitions create a space and context that place the observer physically inside the piece, activating their senses to receive and process the experience. Walking through a library along a series of unfolding collages. Stepping into a field tent to discover blue sky and a shifting cloud in an animated film. Seeing and hearing sand move through an immense hourglass. Opening a book.

My art explores how we yearn to name, interpret, and organize the worlds around and inside us, and plays with the nuanced relationship between fact and truth. I aim to convey a rhythm between the grand and the diminutive, the specific and the impressionistic, that which is known and that which is sensed.