Emerging Leftwing Artist
September 9 - September 24
Monaco is delighted to present Emerging Leftwing Artist, a solo exhibition of work by John Knight in the Main Space. Curated by Monaco member Kalaija Mallery and facilitated by Monaco member Emily Mueller.
Please join us for an opening reception Saturday, September 9, 2023 from 6 to 9 p.m with viewings available on Saturdays from 12 to 4 p.m. and by appointment.
For all inquiries and appointments please contact: Monaco at info@monacomonaco.us / IG: @monaco_usa
Exhibition documentation for Emerging Leftwing Artist by Monaco member Emily Mueller IG: @ferris_muellerz
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
[by Benjamin Anderson]
I recently interviewed John Knight over a phone call. We’ve worked together for years, developing ideas and exhibitions together and telling each other stories. It’s a rare opportunity to get to fully interview someone you know as a friend. The interview lasted about three hours. I heard the full versions of tidbits I’d heard many times. He told me about some experiences that had never come up before or even been alluded to in all of our past conversations. I tend to build my questions for artists by chunking together several half questions and stringing them together to try and have the artist fill that space with their ideas. Knight did so beautifully and intelligently.
My wife and I each took turns spending hours and hours to transcribe the interview. Several months later, when I looked back at the draft, I found that Knight had omitted over half of it. What remained was at first frustrating, but through the duration of reading through the new, stripped-back document and having time to think about the interaction and gesture, I began to see this interview’s new form as quite true to the form of his practice.
Despite the omissions, one of my favorite passages from the original conversation remained in the transcript. We were speaking about painting, cinema, and people. Knight said, “Another way that I’ve always thought about painting is in relation to when janitors paint a schoolyard handrail for years, and the surface of the rail grows sculpturally. I am attracted to that surface tension. It’s a really subtle thing. I guess if I do that enough with a painting, it will slow down the viewer and shift a collective experience of painting.” Objects take upon themselves an erasure through use and upkeep, oftentimes neglected by the attention of their subjects. However it is through this slowed down transformation that everyday objects gain a sentimental state completely separate from what they were before.
The photographic works on display in this exhibition are versions of the first images I ever saw of Knight’s work. The images I saw were a wheatpasted variants of the now-framed prints. They were installed in a musty outdoor cellar space. The iteration I’m referring to is no longer found on the artist’s website, having fallen to the regular omission and building up of layers in the artist’s practice. They were also shown in another iteration in Los Angeles and Chicago before I first saw them, but they have since been dormant over the five years Knight and I have worked together. These returning images are composed of black and white scans of Knight’s grandmother’s floral arrangements and snipped segments of poetic political texts accumulated by the artist. It is a labor that hides itself in its layers. Artistic craft is pitted against the non-craft of the industrial and kept new by the renewal of its surface that shows a history divorced from its manufacturing (both materially and socially) and adhered to its lineage.
In his use of space, Knight refers to Minimalism’s absolute neutral treatment of the viewer in order to slow down. This allows the viewer space for reorientation and reconsideration in which Knight looks to balance a poetics in which the viewer finds themselves related to via the artist’s materialist cues - a wheatpasted sign, wall paint, carpet, a dinner prepared by the artist. Polished manufactured surfaces are replaced with the raw, layered, and used, transforming what was once a reflective ideal with a porous threshold. The cultural and personal objects are scrapped and layered over to the point of appearing neutral and quite possibly difficult; forcing an audience to not only sit with a work, but walk around a space, seeing it from every angle, and return home thinking about it. One doesn’t find themself reflected on the surface of Knight’s work, nor is it easy to project onto it. But with time, a viewer is able to find themselves embedded within the layers of its space.
-Benjamin Anderson; Final Hot Desert, London, UK
Emerging Leftwing Artist is supported in part by a grant from the Montana Arts Council, an agency of he State Government.
BIO
John Knight
John Knight is a conceptual artist and independent curator based in Missoula, Montana. Knight’s work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including BSMNT Gallery (Leipzig, Germany), Final Hot Desert (Salt Lake City, UT and London, United Kingdom), Apparatus Projects (Chicago, IL), Julius Caesar (Chicago, IL), Muscle Beach (Portland, OR), GCADD (Granite City, IL), The Montana Artists Refuge Gallery (Basin, MT), and the American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings (Tucson, AZ). Knight has initiated various artist-run spaces and curatorial projects including Williamson and Knight Gallery; with Iris Williamson (Portland, OR), Cherry and Lucic; with Eleanor Ford and Kyle Raquipiso (Portland, OR), and H. Klum Fine Art; with Lydia Rosenberg (Portland, OR), and THE PINK HOUSE [Jan. 19 1995]; with Andreas Waris at Bad Reputation (Los Angeles, CA). Knight holds a BFA in sculpture from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland.
IG: @knightmarf / website: www.knightjohn.com
For all inquiries and appointments please contact: Monaco at info@monacomonaco.us / IG: @monaco_usa