Far From Home by Amanda Maciel Antunes
RECEPTION AND PERFORMANCE MARCH 3rd : 3-5PM
“(...) Let home be that place where you never notice the bad lighting, let it be a wall whose cracks keep growing until one day you take them for doors.” - Iman Mersal
The photographs in Far From Home were taken by me during various places and times in my life. The only photos I have not taken are from my family’s personal archive, images of my childhood and ancestors. Printed in the 1080:1080 ratio format native to social media, where I have primarily presented them as part of a digital archive, I intervened in each photographic memory by stitching together multiple images and seeing where they meet. It began as a daily ritual in 2017 for a series titled Memory Dissolution, a way for me to rescue my memories from the “cloud”, and continued as an oracular reality. Like inverted places of grief, or a dream of becoming a home far away from home.
The images are presented as a grid on the wall engaging in the realms between reality and surreality by maintaining a constant state of motion, transforming and transferring selves over time.
The performance is a response to the exhibition Far From Home and to the elusiveness of the presence of the people who have occupied the memories in the photographs and altered the landscape. Accounts of migration, ambition, love, alongside violence, illness, and death offer us insight into a world forgotten, and perhaps a key to understanding our world today.
Through a selection of contemporary immigrant and first-generation women artists who have strong roots in LA, Re-Homing Instincts curated by Frida Cano, addresses how the artists traditionally heal their bodies by eating the geosphere itself, the emotional scars that are left after leaving one’s land of origin (Diaspora), and the mode in which immigrants find a new home when connecting with new people in new places.
Participating artists: Labkhand Olfatmanesh and Gazelle Samizay, María Adela Díaz, Galia Linn and Amanda Maciel Antunes, Iman Person
Beautiful Necessity is an installation and durational performance created for this exhibition.
We now live in a time when division and polarity is at its most extreme between the self and the other, the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the mundane. In this installation we set aside these differences to create an altar together. We call that place a beautiful necessity that connects the human with the divine.
Influenced by our interdisciplinary practices, our cross-generational origins and ancestry between Israel and Brazil. This is our third site-specific collaboration aiming to create the potential for exchange between different but necessarily connected worlds.
The word ‘altar’ usually brings to mind the great high altars in religious temples and sanctuaries dedicated to prayer and deity. The etymology of the word ‘altar’ reflects this division, derived from the latin “Altus”, meaning high, and refers to a raised structure for the presentation of offerings to deities. But the place we aim to create is concerned with a different kind of altar. The kind that is not male-determined and or dogma-bound. The history and legacy of altar making is ancient and continues to be a place of dedication by many who seek intimate spaces of reflection and spiritual reclamation, as vehicles of creativity and individual choice that help bring moral claims to fruition. With a wide range of resources and devotional influences we both reclaim our history with female ancestral traditions in our inherited culture to reclaim and align the body and its life cycles with the unrestrained self. This is our home altar, so to speak, providing a visible focus for the validation of women’s contributions to culture and visual language that is distinctive from the dominant patriarchal traditions.
As part of Irrational Exhibits 12 curated by Deborah Oliver.
“Everything is yesterday.” - Hélène Cixous (Well Kept Ruins)
Portraits Of Mortality is a site of reflection on the opposing principles of human nature and our relationships to
myth and surreality, amidst chaos and death. The image and language in this work are specifically connected to
the memories of prehistoric sites, burial structures and ancient cities that incorporated ceremonial rites to return
to unity. Signifying the end of the body and its search for the invisible realms. For roughly 2.5 million years,
humans lived on Earth without leaving a written record of their lives but they created and left traces of
monuments, artifacts and statues, the antithesis of transmutation through time. And yet, there’s a sense of
timelessness in each and every one of these places as they established patterns deeply rooted in the nature of our
actions, as much as they were in the past as they are today. In this performance I ask myself: What could possibly
be the portrait of our humanity today?
“Don’t Believe Everything You Think at Brand Library and Art Center curated by Galia Linn, is an exhibition that explores how artists manage the universal impulse of negative self-talk through their artistic practice. Working across multiple disciplines: painting, collage, sculpture, photography, performance, video, and sound, the 14 featured artists exert concerted effort to push past, accept, or prevail over their own negative self-talk. Through the sanative process of their art—from genesis, to creation, and finally presentation—they have learned that it is best to not always believe everything you think.”
The works on view were part of a series titled Memory Dissolution (2017-ongoing) and a film installation of my durational project titled I’ve Got To Tell You Something Now (2020-2021)
Across her multimedia practice, Amanda Maciel Antunes takes literature and mythology as the basis for an exploration of identity, ancestry, and migration. Working across disciplines including painting, sculpture, performance, and costuming, Antunes reinvents found materials and rejuvenates crafting traditions from her home country of Brazil, creating works inscribed with cultural inheritance at the same time that they are born out of the artist’s self-made rituals. Situated between the artist’s personal history and the universal language of folklore, Antunes’ works reconcile lived experience with the reveries and lessons of the epic.
Antunes’ new body of work is inspired by recent interpretations of Homer’s Odyssey, including Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation of the epic poem and C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka.”
Antunes responds to these texts with a poem of her own, asserting her own place in the continued life of the ancient narrative. Named after the island that serves as the lodestar and final destination of Odysseus' arduous journey, Antunes’ Ithaca contemplates the Utopian ideal of the homeland, re-imagining the island as a matriarchal space.
The paintings and sculptures in Ithaca are united by the dialectical themes of rootedness and placelessness. The ink and acrylic paintings that appear throughout the exhibition hover between abstraction and figuration, composed of organic, gestural shapes filled in with ethereal washes of ink. These interwoven forms alternately suggest bodies and landscapes, guiding the viewer while evading singular interpretation. The works are inspired by the goddesses whose clues lead Odysseus’ way, spirits whose protection is embedded into their surroundings. Several of the works are overlaid with faux leather, cut in fluid geometric forms to allow only fragmentary views of the compositions below. The works conjure the fog of memory, offering glimpses of a world that the viewer must make imaginative leaps to complete. Meanwhile, a monumental sculpture creates the figure of a woman from found and foraged materials, including cotton harvested by the artist. The first stanza of Antunes’ poem appears across the figure’s torso, stitched from a single thread. This work was borne out of the artist’s daily hiking ritual through quarantine: each day, at the summit of Mount Wilson, she would sew one additional line of text. In this way, the work creates a performance from the artist’s physical trajectory, responding to her movements while drawing from the materials of her surroundings. Taken altogether, Antunes’ exhibition speaks to the beauty and profundity of women’s journeys, mining from her own odyssey to forge new space in an epic tradition.
Ithaca
September 10 - October 28, 2021 at Luna Anaïs Gallery at Tin Flats
Soft Architectures features paintings, sculptures, and sound-work by Amanda Maciel Antunes and Alexandria Wallace that ruminate on the physical, emotional, and theoretical architecture of time and memory. Antunes and Wallace’s works employ formal and conceptual gestures that underscore the malleable and impossible endeavor of concretizing formidable events through mental recollection, while simultaneously exploring how perceptions of time and memory shape notions of place and being. Moreover, the works in the exhibition consider the architecture of the Irvine Fine Arts Center galleries not only as a physical space, but as a conceptually ripe meeting ground.
Curated by Virginia Arce at Irvine Fine Arts Center.
“Memoryhouse” is an ongoing series of small and durational poetic narratives and installations that reflect our projected realities and notions of movement as stillness. During the course of the performance, I concede to, interfere with, and change my reality by meddling with my seemingly instinctive area of perception and cultural camouflage. I tell an audience (physical or virtual) that my boundaries on a spectrum are universal constants of the human race. This project is about the state of grace of our lives and where it lies within time given and time taken.
Images from four iterations between 2018-2019 (ongoing)
Memoryhouse VII was located in an abandoned house at a 1930s former farm in 29Palms, CA : currently an Artist Hub renamed MOJAVELAND. This iteration of the durational performance took place in three acts. Following the sun as it rises and travels through a house until sunset. The soundscape was made with field recordings and text written over a period of time. Some objects have been with the artist since Memoryhouse I, others were found on location or made in her studio in LA. The 3 Acts are guided by the idea of dividing our days into three parts (Morning, Afternoon, Evening) and symbolically 3 is the number of the whole as it contains the beginning, a middle and an end. It is also the representation of human as body, soul and spirit.
Duration 2 days from sunrise to sunset as part of Desert Dairy Artist Residency in 29 Pams, CA.
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Memoryhouse is a series of durational performances in abandoned/remote (often decaying) spaces where the artist moves in and meddles with our interpretation of memory. Taking in consideration the memories of the space occupied and that of our own.
Each iteration informs a past memory for the continuity of each consecutive chapter. A total of 7 iterations have been performed so far.
Past locations have included: Union Station, Barclay’s Hotel room 208, The Mine, Crowley Theatre, Desert Dairy Cottage (2016 - 2019)
#memoryhouseperformance
Image Stills from Film Archive and documentation by Sonia Hernandez.
Before Language is an endurance performance that takes into consideration the system of language and behavior, combined with interpretation and intervention, and reconstitutes the room the artist occupies.
One could say that the beginning of language was that of onomatopoetic rhythms and cadence phrasing, which being an unwritten language at first, lived primarily as a sound to be understood rather than as a symbol of meaning. This work takes into consideration the system of language and behavior, combined with interpretation and intervention, and reconstitutes the room the artist occupies. It’s a continuation of a previous project titled Autopsychography where the artist translated the poem Autopsicografia by Fernando Pessoa in five different languages, and it was re-translated back to its original, Portuguese. This new iteration of the work adds twelve new language translations of the poem, along with a period of substantial study of the continuity of anthropological investigation of the man before language and communication. The artist uses her perception of the definition of language as myth and the facts of the mind that manifest itself into matter.
Before Language is a durational Performance that took place at Shoebox Projects in Los Angeles during the course of 3 weeks. Open to the public 7 hours a day. A total of 147 hours.
During the performance we experience the artist in the space continuously under conditions of conflict and adaptation, while manipulating gifted materials running their course to fulfillment.
The days began with a bag of words where the artist pulled five of them, daily and precisely. These five words would designate which materials to utilize. The material then would begin its process of being made into an artifact; either a sculpture, a drawing, or assemblage that gave meaning to the installation; and eventually would finish the poem. For three weeks and seven hour days between five to seven iterations of artifacts were made daily. Constituting the room the artist occupied. It went from word to material and from material to words, looping all day, until material fulfilled its purpose.
The artist was only allowed to manipulate her found and gifted objects that were brought to the gallery throughout this performance by visitors or her own finds throughout this residency.
The installation included but not limited to: video, sound, movement, assemblage, writing, painting and sculpture.
Photos Documentation by the artist and Erik Graham.
Uma performance / exposição ocorrendo em um espaço e tempo pausados por suas conseqüências impraticáveis.
Duration: 10hours
Location: Former WWII shelter in east LA.
GATES is an multi-generational and interdisciplinary installation and the fourth collaboration between Los Angeles based artists Galia Linn (b. Israel, 1963) and Amanda Maciel Antunes (b. Brazil, 1987) that reveal our roles as both witnesses and participants in our lives. Our common materials being yarn, wood, canvas, paint, writing, glass and textiles, build the tension between the soft and the firm, the domestic and the creative, the known and the unknown.
Performance and Installation at Track 16 Gallery as part of Irrational Exhibits 11 / 2019, Los Angeles, CA.
Duration: 2 hours
Often times, as artists, as immigrants, and as women, the source of strength which we need when the outer world fails us, comes from another woman, and we connected as such. This collaboration creates a place where we condense the interpretation of myths, dig into our differences, unwind the courses of our lives, see what remains, and agree to meet there again. We want to learn to distinguish between the false selves that our culture has enforced on us, and the true parts of our femininity which we want to preserve. In this collaboration we tell the stories denied to women; re-imagining the past, present and future of living within a body designated as female.
“Illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world's greatest benefactors.”
-- Virginia Woolf, Orlando
A Center In a Table (ONGOING)
2018-2019 (7 DINNERS SO FAR)
#acenterinatable
A Potluck Dinner with artist Amanda Maciel Antunes and our collective memories.
Guests are invited to bring a dish to share that represents a past memory. These memories are video/sound recorded throughout the evening. This is a private dinner, only confirmed guests can participate. It’s part of a series of memory documentation for an on-going narrative performance piece and film.
If you would like to get on the mailing list for upcoming dinners, go to CONTACT page.
MEMORYHOUSE/EPILOGUE is a performance and installation in three parts. Performed at The Desert Dairy Art Residency’s cottage (that was destroyed by a tornado years ago) in 29 Palms, CA / October 12th and 13th, 2019.
The performance was durational, and lasted two days from sunrise to sunset (24 hours).
The sunlight coming thru the roof of the house informed the transitions between three stages of a scattered body, and its connection between memories of love, loss and retrieval. Drawing from a mirror reflecting light inside the house, the artist carried a ritual by hand, exploring the limits of memory and bringing together its scattered parts. These three parts were defined by the change in wardrobe throughout the day. Visitors were invited to observe the performance from the outside of its walls.
Documentation Images by Erik Graham
