Antonia Kuo
Kuo’s practice centers around recording, image-making, and the potential of the photographic medium. She creates her own intensive processes by which images and materials can be alchemically transformed. In her unique “photochemical paintings” she layers formal elements based on industrial materials and machine parts with imagined—often intuitively derived—natural forms and gestures influenced by her Taiwanese mother’s painting practice in the style of traditional Chinese ink paintings. She merges these discordant elements, evoking an intensity that underlines doubt but retains a reverent attitude toward the chaos and beauty of “natural” phenomena, energies, and matter. Like her photochemical works, Kuo’s sculptures serve as recordings of forms that are lost, obscured, and only partially remembered. Molded in wax, dipped in a ceramic slurry and silica sand, and then fired, they also mimic the forms of machine parts.
The artworks on view are part of a new, hybrid body of work. Presented within aluminum frames, Kuo’s multi-part compositions merge her photochemical paintings with large-format silver gelatin photographs, mounted sculptural reliefs, and powder-coated aluminum panels. Together they expand the mix of imagery and materiality that comprise her visual language.
By juxtaposing traditional photographs with her chemical paintings, Kuo builds upon the conceptual basis of her practice. She unites visually disparate imagery—whether abstract or representational—through their materiality, emphasizing their shared characteristics as recordings of light and time. Kuo also thinks of her sculptures as recordings of forms shaped through an iterative process. She begins by sculpting clay to make rhyming forms and then fabricates ceramic molds for them. Singular components created in this process repeat in the sculptural reliefs included within the wall works as well.
Kuo continues to focus on the inherent materiality and mutability of her chosen subjects. She explores how images are recorded, translated, and transformed through both technology and the hand, and how seemingly unquantifiable sources such as light or electricity can be converted and shaped into image. Through repetitive and physical processes, she records and translates time and gesture, creating a succession of indexical relationships that constitute the core of her practice.