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Mirror Images

Janine Antoni Is Cooler Than You By Danya Ruttenburg Even if Mirror Images failed to include Janine Antoni, one of the art world's New Shining Stars, she's represented in its sister show, "Looking at Ourselves: Works by Women Artists From the Logan Collection" (also up now at SFMOMA). Her razor-sharp, poetically brilliant body-works have garnered increasing attention over the last few years; only 34, she was nominated for the formidable Hugo Boss Prize in '96 and received a coveted MacArthur grant last year. Antoni's earlier work hits hard on obsessiveness, consumerism and beauty culture. (In her 1992 piece Gnaw, she cast two 600-pound cubes--one of chocolate and one of lard--and ate away at them, spitting out the resulting pieces. The chewed chocolate was molded into heart-shaped candy and the lard used for 300 sticks of lipstick.) And her more recent work packs just as smart a punch, but it's taken on an airy quality. From the loom weave of her REM sleep patterns to the distorted performance of a video ballet, the inventions of Antoni's skewed-just-right reality seem to have no end in sight. Keep your eyes on this one, folks; she's going places. We should be so lucky as to come along. [ San Francisco | MetroActive Central | Archives ]