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Karen Antonelli

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Karen Antonelli’s artwork explores memory, place, and displacement, along with the uneasy relationship between the natural and constructed environment. She works across printmaking, drawing, photography, video, and installation. Her process is integral to the work, with materials and methods often shaping the image as much as the original idea.

In her recent collagraphs and linocuts, Antonelli uses cutting, layering, ink, pressure, and embossment to build images that move between landscape, architecture, and abstraction. Works such as Doppelgänger, Sky Fish, and Tower retain the physical evidence of their making through transferred textures, seams, impressions, and hand-drawn additions. Repetition and variation recur throughout the work, as forms shift, overlap, and reappear without becoming exact copies.

These new prints continue ideas Antonelli explored in her earlier drawing collection, I Am the Weather. Created during the early days of the pandemic, the series focused on places in her Pittsburgh neighborhood, particularly the intersection of nature and the built environment. Trees, utility poles, changing skies, and artificial light became a way of examining the human desire for order alongside the unpredictability of the natural world.

Antonelli is an artist and educator living in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Born in England, she came to the US in 1994, originally to undertake a 6-month Residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha Nebraska. As a foreign national and an immigrant, Antonelli is concerned with ideas of memory, place, and displacement; of wilderness and our constructed environment, and our uneasy interactions with what we call “nature”. The way that she makes her artwork is as much about the process and the way that it shapes the expression as it is about the ideas themselves; She is equally maker and conceptualist. Antonelli's artwork encompasses drawing, photography, video, and installation. She has exhibited at Arnolfini Gallery and Bristol City Museum in the UK, and SilverEye, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in Pittsburgh. Three of her large-scale drawings are in the permanent collection on exhibition at the David Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. Her photography is in private collections in both the UK and the US. Antonelli holds an MFA from Vermont College, Vermont. She teaches photography in the BFA program at Point Park University and will be teaching a course in the Fall semester for Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Fine Art.

portfolio.jpg View images from Karen Antonelli's 2021 exhibition, I Am The Weather.

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