Karla Knight on living with the unknown
Over the previous 4 many years, artist-conlanger Karla Knight has doggedly labored in an extraterrestrial idiom, cultivating an otherworldly iconography and an invented language so potent she desires in it. Arriving on the heels of “Navigator,” her survey on the Aldrich Modern Artwork Museum, “Road Trip,” on view from Could 20 to July 1 at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York, options current drawings, work, and tapestries that hover between spaceship blueprint, geometric abstraction, and impenetrable abecedary. Under, Knight addresses her numerous influences, her relationship with paranormality and language, and the essential perform of unknowability in her oeuvre.
THE FIRST WORK I confirmed in New York, at Lorence-Monk Gallery in 1985, was a portray of an orb floating in a Hudson River Faculty–type panorama harking back to the place I grew up in Dobbs Ferry. A 12 months or two later, I dropped the panorama and what remained was the orb, which started to drift in summary area. My aesthetic progressively grew to become much less romantic and biomorphic, and extra diagrammatic and geometric. At my current forty-year survey on the Aldrich Museum, I had the chance to see how long-standing motifs—orbs, eyeballs, spaceships, the invented language I’ve been creating for the previous twenty-odd years—have grown and mutated and actually flourished. As I work by way of a picture or concept, I typically consider the way in which Jasper Johns’s imagery modified throughout every physique of labor and every medium. A number of items in “Street Journey” applicable Johns’s crosshatching motif, approaching it like an ectoplasm during which pictographs are suspended.
I attempt to maintain my life and work open to risk, together with issues that I don’t perceive. I grew up with the paranormal, doing séances and Ouija boarding at East Coast Thanksgivings. There have been transcendentalists and occultists on my paternal aspect, and my father and grandfather wrote in regards to the paranormal and UFOs. On this context, questions round, say, what occurs to the soul after it leaves the physique had been regular avenues of inquiry. From a younger age, my outlook and pursuits had been otherworldly, and I’ve at all times stubbornly pursued these pursuits in my work. I believe that Hilma af Klint’s 2018 Guggenheim present, which was such an unexpectedly big hit, helped open up area for me and what I do within the artwork world, because it gave rise to broader acceptance of labor that explores the inexplicable or unfathomable.
My invented language got here out of watching my son study to learn and write. As they enter the world of written language, children make up and transpose letters; it’s fascinating to observe. Particularly as somebody who grew up round writers, I assumed: Why can’t I concoct my very own language? I started to invent characters, interspersing them with recognizable letters and numbers. The characters aren’t finite, and if I devise a brand new one, it enters the lexicon. Finally, the language grew to become actual to me. I write fluidly in it. I even dream in it. I don’t know what the language means or doesn’t imply, and I favor to maintain it that means. It’s not about decipherment; it’s about residing with the unknown.
I’ve been incorporating outdated ledger paper into my work because the mid-Eighties. I apply the paper to the floor of gessoed linen and paint and draw straight on high of it. On eBay, the place I get a variety of my ledgers, I additionally purchase seamless agricultural feed baggage from the Forties and ’50s. I mix the baggage into fields of material that I paint with glyphs and pictures, sew, and embroider. These tapestries, that are pretty new to my apply, had been vastly influenced by winter counts, which I first noticed in a 2015 exhibition on the Met on the Indigenous individuals of the American plains. Winter counts had been created by the Lakota and different Plains tribes to perform as calendars and accounts of their lives. Typically working in a spiral, tribes added a pictograph yearly to symbolize an necessary incidence from that 12 months, resembling a serious loss of life or celestial occasion. They’re wonderful, and infrequently completed on muslin or animal cover, although you may as well discover examples on ledger paper. All of it comes again to storytelling, or story-accumulating.
My work additionally accommodates poems made with lists of paired English phrases. I supply the phrases from a e-book on invertebrates from the late Nineteen Thirties, Animals With out Backbones. I was a contract e-book indexer, and once I perused this index, I encountered scientific phrases like “ooze dweller” and “primal slime”. These designations struck me, so I began making lists of them, intermixed with made-up phrases. The lists are numbered, and the final quantity is at all times left clean, for no matter’s coming sooner or later. What comes subsequent? Who is aware of, could possibly be something.
— As instructed to Cassie Packard
