Antonia Contro
2001                                          (PRINTS)

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 equations—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 this increasingly rare experience.

Everything that I make begins as a drawing, modest in scale and materials, typically contained in a bound book. These books become my laboratories. Images and ideas within them provoke deeper investigation—through collage, animation, light, sound—which can evolve into layered and expansive installations.

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 cloud shifting 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 only sensed.

I would also like to thank the great student print assistants Jason Clark, Ryan Lindburg and Jolene Suckow that we had on this project for without their dedication and long hours this project would not have been possible.
 - James Bailey, Professor & Director of MATRIX Press.

Antonia's work can be found in the following collections:
American Philosophical Society Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Block Museum, Chicago Tribune, Davis Museum, Delaware Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Gensler, The Illinois State Museum, Motorola Corporation, Museum of Contemporary Photography, New York Public Library, Northwestern University, Polaroid Corporation, Rockford Museum, Taubman Museum, Wabash College, Wellesley College, Werner Kramarsky, other private and institutional collections