• New Works
  • Sense of Place
  • As if nothing ever happened
  • As if nothing ever happened VIDEO
  • Placelessness
  • Videos
  • Statement
  • CV
  • To a Man
Menu

Mikhael Antone

  • New Works
  • Sense of Place
  • As if nothing ever happened
  • As if nothing ever happened VIDEO
  • Placelessness
  • Videos
  • Statement
  • CV
  • To a Man
×

Project Title: "As If Nothing Ever Happened" – Photography and Video

“As If Nothing Ever Happened” is a photographic and video project inspired by the transformation of Freshkills Park in Staten Island—from a massive landfill to a site of reclamation. The work draws a parallel between environmental decay and the trauma of the working class, whose experiences of exploitation and systemic neglect often remain buried and unseen, much like the layers of waste in the landfill.

The series juxtaposes destruction with glimpses of renewal, reflecting the difficult process of confronting and transforming trauma. Through this work, the project explores how, with time and effort, what was once toxic can be reclaimed, offering the possibility of healing and growth. It invites viewers to consider how the pain of the past, though often ignored or forgotten, can lead to a future of renewal and change.

 

The photographs need to be analog because imperfection is important to the work. Many are double exposures, overexposed or underexposed, blurred, or made at night. They are not meant to be crisp or descriptive. I print them on archival paper and adhere them to canvas or wood, where they become the starting point for a larger constructed landscape.

I grew up in a shoe repair shop, surrounded by remnants: leather, rubber, glue, stains, scraps, worn surfaces, and things waiting to be repaired. That material language has found its way into the work. Around the photographs I build layers of earth tones, reds, yellows, blues, wax, and surfaces that sometimes resemble rubber cement or shoe glue. The image becomes partially absorbed into this material world. I am not trying to reconstruct the landscape as it existed. I am trying to reconstruct the feeling of it.

Making the work has become a kind of ritual excavation. I am digging for an unconscious or subconscious reality beneath something that appears ordinary and directly in front of me. There is a tension between the physical landscape and my own lack of presence within it. I have strong, visceral memories of growing up around chaos, and those experiences inevitably altered the way places became embedded in my psyche. The landscape I construct around each photograph becomes an interior landscape as much as an exterior one.

I repeatedly cover and seal these surfaces with encaustic beeswax. There is something important to me about sealing the image in this way, almost preserving it outside of ordinary time. The finished object can begin to resemble a memorial, an artifact, or even a death mask. Yet the process is also an act of release. I am taking something that has remained psychologically unresolved and giving it physical form.

More recently, I have begun introducing fragments of text that function almost like intrusive thoughts. They interrupt the landscape rather than explain it. Images, materials, colors, memories, and words that may initially seem mismatched are allowed to accumulate until they form their own reality. The process is not about resolving memory or making it clear. It is about giving these fragments somewhere to exist outside of me. By building them, covering them, and sealing them into the object, I give them a home rather than continuing to avoid them or allowing them to remain buried inside.