CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES / STAND
Christopher Knowles is a returning alumni artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the aural and visual elements of language. His work is heavily featured in The Watermill Center Collection, and he participated in The Watermill Center’s founding International Summer Program in 1992. Now, The Watermill Center presents a comprehensive exhibition of Knowles’s work throughout the South Wing of the main building, covering a broad range of his artistic career from the 1970s through today, including drawings, typings, paintings, sculpture, and sound work. This exhibition is the result of an in-depth two-year examination of Knowles’s vast archive that revealed many new associations, bodies of works, and approaches never presented to the public–providing a unique and highly comprehensive insight into Knowles’s artistic oeuvre. Highlights include groups of work that have never been exhibited publicly–including 1970s typings and paintings–as well as new paintings and sculpture. Christopher Knowles lives and works in New York City. He is represented by Bridget Donahue.
Christopher Knowles / STAND is curated by Noah Khoshbin. Special thanks to Lauren DiGiulio, Bridget Donahue, Sarah Knowles, and Maria Bacardi.
On view through March 11, 2023.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Christopher Knowles (b. 1959) is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in poetry, painting, sound art, performance, and sculpture. Since the early 1970s, he has remixed visual and sonic material from popular culture to create vibrant new vocabularies that expand our understanding of information systems. His work pushes into the gaps between language, sound, and the visual image, creating a hybrid, reparative method of communication that blends the concrete and the abstract. Knowles’s work has been exhibited in many solo and group showings internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Musée Galliera in Paris, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and the Tate Modern, London. Beginning in the early 1970s, Knowles collaborated on the creation of a series of theater works staged by the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds under the direction of Robert Wilson. He wrote the libretto for Wilson and Philip Glass’s 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach. A book of his typewriter poems, Typings 1974-1977 was published by Vehicle Editions in 1979. In 2015, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia presented a retrospective exhibition of his work titled Christopher Knowles: In a Word. His 2012-2015 solo performance The Sundance Kid is Beautiful with Christopher Knowles was presented at the Louvre Museum, the Whitebox Gallery in New York, and the ICA, Philadelphia. His poetry has been published in a variety of magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Interview, and Office magazines. Knowles’s two and three-dimensional works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Watermill Center, and numerous other institutional and private collections. He lives and works in New York City.
ROBERT NAVA / STAND
Robert Nava / STAND features contemporary drawings and animations by Inga Maren Otto Fellow Robert Nava, inviting visitors to engage with the works within the artist’s studio space. The exhibition will include new works on paper made during his residency at The Watermill Center, which will be complemented by additional recent works. Robert Nava’s work embodies a new kind of myth making, drawing from mythology, philosophy, religion, and ancient history as well as video games, monsters, and the animal kingdom.
On view through September 2022.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Robert Nava (b. 1985, East Chicago, IN) received a BFA in Fine Art from Indiana University as well as an MFA in Painting from Yale University. His practice centers on large-scale paintings and works on paper that portray whimsical creatures, rendered through gestural markings. Finding inspiration in the art of the distant past, from Medieval Christian imagery to Mayan and Sumerian art, as well as popular contemporary sources such as animation, Nava creates compositions that are carefully considered yet marked by a sense of naivete and spontaneity. His art has been exhibited in various solo exhibitions both domestically and abroad, including Bloodsport (2022) at Night Gallery, Robert Nava (2021) at Pace East Hampton, Robert Nava (2021) at Pace Palm Beach, Robert Nava: Angels (2021) at Vito Schnabel Gallery, and Robert Nava (2020) at Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels. Robert’s work is in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and Zuzeum Art Center, Riga, Latvia.