Janine Antoni: Gender and Art
In 1993 Janine Antoni, a Bahaman born artist, created the piece Butterfly Kisses. Antoni began by coating her eyelashes with Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara. She used her eyelashes as a paint brushes and butterfly kissed or blinked on a pieces of paper with her right and left 1,245 times creating a diptych. In a lot of Janine works, she takes parts of everyday beauty routines and creates a new perspective in a performance piece. According to Janine Antoni MATRIX 129 from Wadsworth Atheneum, Butterfly Kisses took over a month to create at 20 winks at time three times a day (Miller-Keller). Janine Antoni took a simple gesture of affection or flirtation and gave it a new meaning. Butterfly Kisses was part of the Loving Care exhibition in 1996. This piece takes on two different mediums, it is first a performance piece and secondly a painting. The performance part of this piece is only a small part of the work. The second medium, painting, challenges stereotypical female preoccupation with make-up and the ordinary “smallness” of its applications, as well as other “girlish” diminutive acts (Karamitsos). The painting is not a creation of hand, Antoni creates a new brush using a part of her body, the eyelash. One of Janine’s signatures is creating art with body …show more content…
Gnaw, which was part Antoni’s first solo exhibition, is an installation piece containing three sculptures. Gnaw started as two 600-pound cubes cast one of chocolate and the of lard. With the pieces removed from the 600-pound cubes, she created forty-five heart-shaped boxes of chocolate and 400 pigmented lipsticks. The process took over a month and a half to reach the final product. From an interview with Janine Antoni, Simon Taylor learned the artist “nearly vomited while biting into the lard cube and suffered from blistered and swollen lips after gnawing repeatedly at the chocolate”
In 1993 Janine Antoni, a Bahaman born artist, created the piece Butterfly Kisses. Antoni began by coating her eyelashes with Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara. She used her eyelashes as a paint brushes and butterfly kissed or blinked on a pieces of paper with her right and left 1,245 times creating a diptych. In a lot of Janine works, she takes parts of everyday beauty routines and creates a new perspective in a performance piece. According to Janine Antoni MATRIX 129 from Wadsworth Atheneum, Butterfly Kisses took over a month to create at 20 winks at time three times a day (Miller-Keller). Janine Antoni took a simple gesture of affection or flirtation and gave it a new meaning. Butterfly Kisses was part of the Loving Care exhibition in 1996. This piece takes on two different mediums, it is first a performance piece and secondly a painting. The performance part of this piece is only a small part of the work. The second medium, painting, challenges stereotypical female preoccupation with make-up and the ordinary “smallness” of its applications, as well as other “girlish” diminutive acts (Karamitsos). The painting is not a creation of hand, Antoni creates a new brush using a part of her body, the eyelash. One of Janine’s signatures is creating art with body …show more content…
Gnaw, which was part Antoni’s first solo exhibition, is an installation piece containing three sculptures. Gnaw started as two 600-pound cubes cast one of chocolate and the of lard. With the pieces removed from the 600-pound cubes, she created forty-five heart-shaped boxes of chocolate and 400 pigmented lipsticks. The process took over a month and a half to reach the final product. From an interview with Janine Antoni, Simon Taylor learned the artist “nearly vomited while biting into the lard cube and suffered from blistered and swollen lips after gnawing repeatedly at the chocolate”