antonia contro

Artist Statement

In my work, I explore the nature of knowledge, how it is conveyed, and what “knowing” is. I am interested in the relationship between common ways of sharing knowledge—words or data—and the intuitive, often subconscious 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 potential to inspire empathy and connection to each other and community.

Most everything I make begins as a quick note or drawing in a sketchbook or on a scrap of paper. Books and journals are my laboratories. The images and ideas within them provoke deeper investigations—collage, animation, light, sound—which often evolve into immersive and expansive installations, multidisciplinary projects, and collaborations.

My site-specific exhibitions create a space and context that place the observer physically within the piece, activating their senses to receive and process the experience. Walking the length of a long table to view a series of collages. Stepping into a tent in a field to discover blue sky and a solitary cloud. Seeing and hearing sand move through an immense hourglass. Opening a book and entering into its evocative soundscape.

My art explores how we yearn to name, interpret, and organize the worlds around, inside, and beyond 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 measurable and that which is felt.

Antonia Contro Studio Visit with Martha Mae