Antony

"I have drawn and made things since I was a kid. The visual world is a place I can dream in solitude. I think about the present and how can I reach out to gather the past and the future and draw them towards me. I try to follow the lines, tracing the invisible. Sometimes it's a simple matter of bringing something into focus, or drawing forward the spirit I imagine lies hidden inside a thing. Other times, it's finding the flamingo that lives inside the shadow of my heart. Or I could try to cry a circle for the green eye light of a sea horse."

Antony's drawings open up landscapes that are at once otherworldly and confessional. Often fragmentary in appearance, these images map the artist’s dreams and liminal states; polymorphic realms give way to indicated spirits; pen marks and scratches conjure archetypes and invite the fear and grace of the unconscious to emerge.

Recalling the notebooks of William S. Burroughs and Antonin Artaud, Antony’s collages employ a transgender intervention to readjust the colonial topography of the American Dream. In 'I Want To Help' (2007) a torn 1950's Life magazine clipping of caribou is carefully stitched together; Antony restores the broken landscape, and the scene of frozen serenity seems to take a sudden breath. Elsewhere, the hunters of a tiger are compulsively scratched out in a vigilante act of justice; and a photograph depicting a Native American woman is carefully embellished, as though the act of treasuring this vulnerable figure could somehow redeem the time. Hegarty depicts landscapes haunted by the past and the future, seeking to identify a sense of crisis, morality and truth upon which a path forward can be forged.

Each piece is 'worked on' - drawn on, burned, soaked in the rain, thrown away and reclaimed, drawn on again, stained or dried over a fire. Taken as a whole, these collages and drawings describe the arc of a dream atlas in which each diverse aspect is unified through the desire for healing.

Isis is immensely proud to be the first platform for public exposure of these little spells.

Void, 2007
Ink on paper, 20.8 x 13cm
© Antony

» More works by Antony

Further reading

» antonyandthejohnsons.com

» New York Times interview

» The Independent interview

» El Pais interview