About

I paint from personal and media images to examine my sense of identity. I am interested in images that depict or imply bodies and places, reflecting on a sensation of physical and psychological fragmentation and displacement.

My recent body of work is a series of small representational paintings of everyday life. These paintings derive from images collected from social media accounts, advertising, film, and from my personal photo archive. The work is structured as an installation of paintings (between 11x14” and 18 x 24”) mounted in groupings. Individual paintings are cropped fragments and excerpts of larger and more “complete” source images. The format of the installation and consistency in my formal and material choices creates an implied narrative relationship but maintains an intentional absence of resolution or cohesion.

This work addresses the theme of displacement from a very personal perspective. The complete series of paintings revolves around a single fragmented photograph of me and my father, taken soon after we immigrated and set out on what became a lifetime of migration across countries, pursuing an illusive idea of “home.” In this picture, we stand side by side within a rocky, mountainous landscape. It is, both literally and figuratively, a very precarious image. Several paintings in the series derive from various sections of this photograph, cropped and enlarged to differing scales that distort and estrange the image.

The photograph acts as a fractured throughline for the larger installation of fragmented fantasies, projections, and representations of unattainable ideals: domestic spaces found on lifestyle themed social media accounts, advertisements for holidays popping up on my phone, and aspirational film stills: images that reveal the architecture of desire that guide my imagination. I am interested in Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” defining the complex relationship between an individual and their objects of desire, where the pursuit of happiness and well-being can become counterproductive or destructive. Similarly, my work reflects on the contradictions, inconsistencies, and incongruencies between a life desired, remembered, and the one ultimately lived.

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Michael Antkowiak (born in Warsaw, Poland, 1977) is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design and completed his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2003. He has since exhibited in public and commercial galleries in Canada and abroad, including the Queens Museum of Art in New York City, and Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago, Il. Michael is a recipient of several artist’s grants and residencies, including the Ontario Arts Council Grant, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. In addition to his studio practice in Toronto, Michael teaches with the Faculty of Art at OCAD University and with the Art and Art History Program - Department of Visual Studies, UTM/Sheridan College.

Michael Antkowiak wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council through the Visual Artists: Emerging grant.