Unless the past and the future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there is nowhere to go.
– Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974
We each have our own maps. Unique cartograms that trace our movements through time. We move when culture changes its mind and when networks are forced to expand due to socio-political motives. These motives are gods and monsters, traveling through centuries, not always in a straight line. They trickle through data and nest in our heads, sometimes in the form of corrupt files. To be dispossessed is to be as the world is: twisting, burning, updating and in perpetual exile, wondering where to go and when to stop. – MLA
Clint Roenisch is pleased to present new works by Marvin Luvualu Antonio, on view at 190 Saint Helens Ave in Toronto. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. His work has previously appeared in the group shows, Cut The World Until It Fits On The Back Of Your Hand and The Agency Of Acquaintances. His solo exhibition will contain new paintings and sculpture inside an environment of the artist’s devising. Antonio is of Angolan descent but was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1986 and grew up in London and Ethiopia. At thirteen he moved on his own to Canada. Antonio’s peripatetic upbringing by intellectually and politically engaged parents and his subsequent immigration here alone at a young age, has informed much of his recent work as an emerging artist. Themes and questions of cultural appropriation, the politics of race, identity, nomadism, bonds, discomfort, the discarded and improvised, are all shot through the work. As in the films and performances of Ana Mendiata; the Rimbaud photographs of David Wojnarowicz, the politically pointed works of David Hammons and Glenn Ligon, Luvualu Antonio continues a line of artistic inquiry that is immediate, personal and fully inhabited.
Marvin Luvualu Antonio lives in Toronto. He studied photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design and in 2014 he was awarded the AGO/AIMIA Photography Scholarship Prize from a field of one hundred and ten candidates. Solo exhibitions include A Photo-Body On Drugs Smells at Gallery 44 (2016); Trash Talks at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2015) and Pink Matter at Jr Projects, Toronto (2014). Group exhibitions include Talking Back, Otherwise, curated by Cheyanne Turions at the Jackman Humanities Institute (2016); 9 to 5 and Play-Doh, both at Warner Gallery (2016, 2015). Publications include Language and the Ocularcentric Nature of Existentialism, Swimmers Group Press (forthcoming) and Every Object Has a Story: Extraordinary Canadians Celebrate the Royal Ontario Museum, Royal Ontario Museum, Royal Anansi Press, 2014.
