Janine Antoni
Bahamian, born 1964
One another, which captures a touching and unexpected gesture from Janine Antoni’s daughter during one of her first self-feeding sessions, is not a staged image but a happy occurrence caught on film. Antoni claims the work “captures [my daughter] attempting to feed me through my belly button. She's acting like an umbilical cord, returning me to my fetal memory. . . . I fell in love with her uncanny instinct and tender gesture of reciprocity. It's like an image from a dream."
This image references an earlier work by Antoni entitled Umbilical, which incorporates a cast of Antoni’s family silverware and a negative impression of the artist's mouth and her mother's hand. As One another shows a daughter’s intimate gesture that returns the artist to her “fetal memory,” so Umbilical embodies the artist’s memory of the nurturing exchange between her and her own mother.
Label from One Another: Spiderlike, I Spin Mirrors, March 7–June 1, 2014