JANINE ANTONI: A rope is an umbilical cord, you know.
It's something that connects two things.
Which sort of is what Moor is about.
It's about all these people being, you know, my life sort of connecting
all these people. The idea was to take all these very different materials,
but also lives, and sort of bring them
together through the rope making process.
My mother's fall I put in there.
And then my friend Pat made this piece with hammocks,
so that's what this is.
Another friends' piece, Doug,
this is his Hi8 tape that we took apart.
And this is sort of my favorite section;
this is the section of the grandmothers.
This red dress is my father's mother's Christmas dress...
I wonder whether the viewer can in some way
uncover these stories through their experience of the object,
whether these stories are somehow held in the material.
Melissa: With a lot of the material what was done is they were cut up into strips
or say if it was an electrical cord it was taken apart
and all the wires inside were taken apart,
and then twisted together with other materials to create a rope.
Since I was a little girl, my mother and I would make things together,
actually the whole family would make things together.
And I love the handmade in any form it takes.
There's so many objects that we come into contact with
that we've lost a connection to what they're made of,
who made them.
So that's really important for me to sort of, in the object, on the
surface of the object, somehow give you a history
of how that object's made its way into the world.
To make this piece what I did is I dipped myself in a tub of lard.
The piece is called Eureka and it was inspired by the story of Archimedes.
And Archimedes was asked by the kind how much gold was in his crown and he
was killing himself how can he measure capacity?
Well he's in the bathtub one night
and he realizes that his body is displacing the water in the tub.
He gets very excited, jumps out and screams "Eureka."
It seems to me that Archimedes's body was the tool for the experiment,
just as my body is the tool for making.
But most importantly is this idea that he came to this knowledge through
the experience of his body.
And that's why I do these kind of extreme acts with my body.
I feel that the viewer has a body too and can empathize with what I've put
myself through to make the artwork.
To me so much meaning is in how we choose to make something,
both in art but in all objects that we deal with in our lives.
I kind of think of the work as like the viewer is coming in on the scene of a
crime. And I've left all these clues for them to uncover.
I did this show and the exhibition space was connected to a dairy farm.
So right away I said can you give me a tour of the barns.
And I noticed that troughs are made out of tubs.
I thought what if I take a bath, will the cow continue to drink,
thinking that you know I've drunk from the cow my whole life
and I could sort of create this relationship.
Well cows are very curious, they all came,
started drinking, and it almost reversed the whole relationship.
She looks like she's nursing from me.
And the title of the piece is 2038 which is the tag in the ear,
and the reason I chose that is I felt that that epitomized our relationship to the
cow, that it was almost like a hardly an animal anymore,
but a biological machine and I wanted that to contrast the kind of tenderness of
the image. I was really thinking about um the Virgin Mary and these images
we know of her.
Like the Virgin Mary is not allowed to do anything physical.
No sex, she doesn't get to die.
The only thing she's allowed to do is nurse.
And I was thinking about how does that image affect my ideas of motherhood
and that sort of idyllic moment that we know from those paintings
but also from Pampers ads of mother and child.