http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/arts/design/antonia-wright-re-enacting-a-childhood-trauma-on-video-for-art.html 2016-09-14 19:40:10 Re-enacting a Childhood Trauma on Video. For Art. Twenty years ago, the artist Antonia Wright fell into a frozen lake, an incident that inspired her new exhibition. === When she was 15, Antonia Wright was walking across the frozen surface of a reservoir near Boston with a friend when the ice gave way, and they both plunged into the freezing water. They weren’t supposed to be there, of course — the reservoir was off limits. So help was not close by. She struggled to crawl out, but kept losing her grip on the ice. In that moment, Ms. Wright, now a successful artist, felt sheer panic. Finally, after five or 10 minutes — time seemed to slow down in the moment, she recalled in a recent interview — the pair were able to break through enough ice to open a path to the shore. She spent a week battling hypothermia. “It was traumatic in the moment,” Ms. Wright said. “But then afterward it was more curious, or exhilarating. Like, a ‘Wow, what just happened?’ kind of feeling.” The artist, 36, has revisited that traumatic event as part of a new multimedia exhibition that just opened at the nonprofit Locust Projects gallery in Miami. The show, “ The installation also incorporates lights on timers and a mazelike corridor filled with night-blooming jasmine plants. In the darkened space, the jasmine plants release their nocturnal fragrance as visitors wind their way toward a double-sided video screen. “Why not use the darkness that these videos require to bring out another one of our senses?” she said. The video’s overheated color palette was inspired by J. M. W. Turner’s “ Ms. Wright has made video works for years, but as the writer Alpesh Kantilal Patel She once She filmed the performance on Lake Champlain, with a team of ice divers on hand, but this time the event was far less harrowing. “During the video shoot, when I was submerged in the lake, it was a few of the most peaceful and beautiful seconds of my life,” she wrote in an email. Ms. Wright said that she told no one of the incident for years: “I didn’t even tell my mom about it until I made the video. She got mad at me, and I was like, ‘You’re not allowed to get mad at me about something that happened 20 years ago.’”