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

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

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This work brings together roughly fifteen years of photography with a lifetime of skirting around painting. The photographs I use are analog images of places connected to memory, particularly the shared landscapes surrounding where I grew up. They are not intended as documents, nor am I interested in making the locations easily recognizable. They operate more like fragments of dreams: familiar but unstable, hovering somewhere between memory and place.

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.