Create! Magazine is pleased to share the announcement of Cuban-American artist Antonia Wright’s current exhibition “I Came to See the Damage That Was Done and the Treasures That Prevail” which is on view at Spinello Projects in Miami through October 29th.

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Where There is Power, There is Resistance — Wright and artist Ruben Millares explore the sculptural and symbolic potential of steel barricades, evoking associations with crowd control, mass protest, and policing tactics. The artists have replaced the steel bars with tubes of fluorescent lights as a commentary on the fragility of order.

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Wright’s new body of work is a fierce reaction to the women’s reproductive rights crisis in the post-Roe v. Wade world we currently inhabit. The anchor of the exhibition is a new installation, Women in Labor, a generative sound art composition that protests the changing laws around access to safe and legal abortion. The piece contains a collection of sounds made by women in labor — including those from her own homebirth in 2015 — collected in collaboration with midwives. The piece uses a generative algorithm to sonify the increase in mileage a woman will now have to travel to access reproductive care. In Florida, for example, that number has increased to 583 miles after 15 weeks.

In a series of other works across the exhibition, the artist uses her own pregnant body to explore the dualities of pregnancy — the beauty and the pain, the ecstasy and the anguish, the anticipation and the anxiety.

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And So With Ends Come Beginnings — a film wherein Wright uses her own 9-month pregnant body to trace the ecstasies and the anxieties surrounding bringing new life into a fraught world. The film superimposes views of the Miami skyline, emulating the rising water levels in South Florida resulting from climate change.
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Are You OK? — a performance series begun in 2015 that explores the concept of human empathy. Wright goes into the streets to cry while capturing the responses of those passing as a social experiment of human behavior. In the video on view, the artist is pregnant which complicates the responses of passersby.

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Artist Biography: 

Antonia Wright is an artist based in Miami, FL. Wright received her MFA from The New School in New York and completed the General Studies program at the International Center of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY, The Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, The Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles, Locust Projects and Spinello Projects in Miami. Her work is held in the permeant collection of The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, El Espacio 23, Lotus House, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, and NSU Art Museum in Ft. Lauderdale. Wright recently won a 2019-2020 South Florida Cultural Consortium Award, the Ellies 2020 Creator Award, and was a 2021 CINTAS Foundation Fellowship finalist awarded to artists with Cuban heritage. Wright's work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, i-D, New York Magazine, Daily News, Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and The Art Newspaper.

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Alicia Puig has been a contributing writer for Create! Magazine since 2017. Find more of her work: www.aliciapuig.com