Second Sundays Artist Interviews: Ruben Millares and Antonia Wright

Clocktower’s Jake Nussbaum hosts Pioneer Works artists in residence Ruben Millares and Antonia Wright, broadcast live from Pioneer Work’s October Second Sunday.

Antonia Wright explores the various politics and comic facets of contemporary life through a multidisciplinary practice that blurs the boundaries between live performance, video, photography, sculpture, poetry, and perception. With extreme attention to esthetic quality, her work brings everything to the body to create powerful visual metaphors that at times appear ambivalent but are never obscure. Wright acknowledges the layers of societal taboos and barriers between her artistic choices, and pointedly pushes them into the public realm for the viewer to examine and assimilate. Wright discusses her performance art, and how her mode of work is to bring everything in contact with the body, always making the experience as visceral as possible. With her self-proclaimed high pain tolerance and deep relationship with empathy, Wright seeks to captures the boundaries between vulnerability and strength. With her collaborator Ruben Millares, the artist is currently compiling a Led Zeppelin archive of vowel sounds from every single record the band ever released in addition to their performance art.

The work of Miami, Florida born artist Ruben Millares speaks to the balance between man and the natural world. He attempts to highlight the constant flux and fragility of that relationship. Through the use of different mediums, often presented in communion with each other, he captures an array of emotions and visual textures. His pieces are polyvalent and allow for a multi layered experience to develop with the viewer. His practice covers mundane, repetitive activities similar to those found in standard work settings and juxtaposes them with the unpredictable aspects of the natural environment around us. As an artist with a formal educational training as a Certified Public Accountant and Financial Planner, as well as in art and music, Millares is in a constant search for the fusion between practicality and imagination. In the interview, Millares describes his current set of ongoing projects which include large scale sculptures, his band Chicken Liquor which revisits early rock and roll and of course his collaboration with Antonia Wright.

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