After the paper was relieved of memory, after the books were bound in black linen, after the tables were mortised and smoothed, after everything was finished and complete, especially the books on the shelves, and the tables, more or less complete with only the book wedges on them staring upward like empty jars

It would seem that the day after all this was done, then the work began. The artist initiated the slow, daily process of application, another day, another page, then one day returning, coming back to the pages, first the rectos in series, then the versos in series, so that the reading order is right to left now, like semitic languages, perhaps because written in stone

And daily practice compromised these media, I don’t know if you could call it drawing, though a composition of linear elements did emerge, maybe it was a relief, a low relief, like the scrolling paths eaten by shipworms, or the labyrinthine feeding galleries of the emerald ash borer, the record of a kind of nourishment from which, when it is complete, the beneficiary pushes through a D-shaped hole in an outer surface and takes flight, changed beyond recognition

So the work continued to move in the direction of sculpture, sculpture having height in the technical sense but existing effectively only as an area, a sculpture with two good dimensions, or in the direction of the labyrinth, a building that acts like a drawing, an enclosure open at both ends, a barrier preventing communication between inside and outside by no means other than the passage of days; not a walled-off space, but walled-off time

in which the medium is consumed or eroded but without hostility and without tenderness, a kind of resignation, the artist laying a ground in which to engrave a process of self-improvement or mastery, marring the uncirculated book, distressing the surface, hanging the picture like a tapestry.

– Cyrus Console

Corey Antis’ work has been exhibited in national and international exhibitions at Haw Contemporary, Zurcher Gallery, the Rebekah Templeton Gallery, Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University, Booster and Seven Gallery, the Vox Populi Gallery, Three Walls, Heaven Gallery, Jenny Jaskey Gallery, the D.C. Arts Center, Greenstone Gallery, Hunter College, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Frieze Projects Art Fair, the Stray Show and SPACE Gallery, among others.