Photo credit: Tom van Eynde 2025.




At Land
Corey Antis



June 13 - August 1st, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday June 13th, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Space & Time is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of Corey Antis’ recent artist books and works on paper. This is his first exhibition with the gallery. Selected works on view grow out of a sustained investigation into the site and how it both folds and contains experience, with a specific focus on mapping the changing Kansas City landscape. Tactility, pressure and drag are embedded into Antis’s surfaces- a proto image developer process by way of ink, dirt and slab architecture.



Notes for an Interview with Corey Antis, 2025, Cyrus Console.


“Rocks are records of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.”

-Annals of the Former World


These drawings are executed on diaphanous paper, on paper so thin as to approach evanescence. They depict the surfaces over which the paper is laid—brick; tile;hardwood; oriented strand board; steel bar grating, as of a fire escape; cardboard crushed into the splines of its own corrugation; concrete that retains the woodgrain of an absent form; the tread pattern called diamond plate; the print of coarse mesh; the mesh of an afternoon.


If they reveal one pattern more thematic than these various networks and lattices, it is the wavelike manual sweep of carpet adhesive from a notched trowel, the cured glue left behind after the rug is pulled; the cursive hand of a vanished laborer. The paper is so fine it almost ceases to support an image; it is almost more like a window. And yet it registers the image faithfully.


You could say the subject of the work is this outsourcing of perception to the support itself, is what the paper itself knew as it was dampened and debossed onto the irregular surface, thin as lacquer; you could say that the subject of the work is touch, the application of ink that forms a contact print of the surface, the touch of the cloth barren loaded with pigment—and the object it touches is the floor; it touches the ground; you could say that the subject of the work is its object, which is where the language begins to pull away.


It is a figure of the ground. It is a drawing of the wall. But this sedimentation of content is only the beginning. The crisis, the stroke, takes place nearer the end, when by long stitches the many drawings are gathered into codices, bound in linen or black

mohair. The process is metamorphic.


The project is fundamentally literary. The drawings, though painstaking, are accomplished in a region almost without light, without depth. They are not visual but haptic; they are no more subjective than painting, in the house painter’s sense. Their

correspondence is perfect. There is no parallax. They do not scale. It is significant that the paper is so thin. It is as thin as a coating, a film. In the days of magnetic tape there was a phenomenon where future music, if it were loud enough, could magnetize an image of itself onto adjacent windings of the spool. This was called pre-echo. The leaves are so exquisite that they print through; one page gives onto the pages below, a visual prospect by which the books obtain a depth of field absent from the drawings compiled in them. At times the body of Antis’s work achieves effects so durable that the verso will contain fossils; it achieves moments of such amplitude that you can see the future in the facing page.

-Cyrus Console, 2025.