Rubber Factory is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Antonia Kuo, titled Collapsed Field.

In response to our increasingly disembodied relationship with the visual and technology, Kuo engages concretely and physically with the picture plane, speaking to a materialist present. She pivots around the photographic, tackling it through other media, creating objects that act as recording or encapsulating devices for time, light, materials and process. Objects are embedded with image or have an indexical relationship to image, and are reconfigured in three-dimensional space. Her work explores how image and form are recorded, translated and transformed through technology and the hand.

The main photographic presence in Collapsed Field is a tiled, UV-printed steel sculpture that reflects time Kuo spent at a foundry. She took photographs with a microscope (micrographs) of metal alloy compositions and subsequently UV-printed and mosaicked the tiles onto welded armatures, underlining the relationship between the imaging of structure and the structuring of images. Slumped, fused and cast glass works simultaneously isolate and echo the notion of the tiled unit, a skin for an emergent structure, as well as point to our material screen reality. Heat and gravity are active agents in casting and slumping; intense heat enables state change, coercing material to shape shift. In the slumping process, the matrix of the form is approximated through this heat in the language of the shroud or veil, leaving a crystallized, solid-state cavity – a vacuum form memory or record.

Antonia Kuo (b. 1987, New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, film, sculpture, drawing, painting and printmaking. She received an MFA from Yale University, a BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University, and a one-year certificate from the School of the International Center of Photography under the Alan L. Model Grant. Antonia was awarded the Robert and Stephanie Olmsted Award as a MacDowell Colony Fellow, as well as fellowships at Mass MoCA, The Banff Centre, Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Vermont Studio Center and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. Her work has exhibited internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Eyebeam, Microscope Gallery, Pioneer Works, and the Knockdown Center in New York; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in Montreal; and the 1933 Slaughterhouse (老坊) in Shanghai, among others. Her work is in private collections and The Whitney Museum of American Art.