Second Birth by Amanda Maciel Antunes
*signed by artist
Second Birth is a split diary, a journey through time, and a series of correspondences between the lives of Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) and Amanda Maciel Antunes (b.1987). These two immigrant artists share a deep faith in the potency of the creative process and the collective unconscious. At twenty-one, Antunes learned English from a worn copy of Nin’s Diary IV. By chance, she now finds herself living in the Sierra Madre home where Nin lived and worked for nearly ten years in the 1950s.
Long before French feminism called for écriture feminine, Nin conceived “the language of the womb” writing composed through expressions of female experience. The diary became her ideal form, a space to record impressions of life alongside memories, dreams, and aspirations. Antunes echoes the form of the diary through her image and text translations inspired by her research of the Anaïs Nin Papers archived at UCLA. The fragments collected in Second Birth reflect meditations on motherhood, memory, time, the creative process, feminism, dreams, death, and the small moments that make up a life.
Amanda Maciel Antunes (aka dama) is a self-taught Brazilian artist of indigenous South American and Portuguese descent based in Los Angeles. Her transdisciplinary practice merges language and durational performance to create paintings, sculpture, sound, film and assemblage. She works in collaboration with public libraries, nature and communal spaces as points of departure for ritual and process, reflecting on the selective nature of memory, inherent language and anthropological references.
Most recent select exhibitions and solo performances at Commons LA, Galeria Vermelho, Galeria Chão, Irrational Exhibits at Track16 Gallery, Luna Anaïs Gallery, Redondo Beach Historic Library, Irvine Fine Arts Center and Wignall Museum. Forthcoming in 2023, solo show at Flux Artspace and group shows at Brand Art Library, Wonzimer Gallery and 18th Street Art Center.
PUBLISHED BY:
HEXENTEXTE is a Los Angeles-based collaborative project dedicated to the research, presentation, and publication of works at the intersection of image, text, and the body. HEXENTEXTE borrows her name from Unica Zurn’s book of anagrammatic poems and automatic drawings.
paperback
