shybird 2, Bill Knott

What I am attracted to in this particular painting is the complexities of its gesture as a figure, combined, paradoxically, with a simple, unadorned quality of expression.  The painting is at ease with itself–the figure’s clownish curtsy mocked effortlessly by the sheepishly hooded eyes and benign frown.  The limbs so perfectly balance the gesture that one is hard-pressed to imagine another possible rendering.  The colors, too, even in their minimalist boldness, do little to distract from the overall effect.  The black-lined red pronounces the figure’s lovely hunch, while the orange highlights make for the playful yet deliberate movement.  The sharp white draws us to the sleepy drabness of the face’s attractive malaise, the flawless eyes pronouncing a weary beak.  A figure “maligned,” perhaps, but still finding, in an increasingly apathetic age, a unique form of self-conscious protest.  Thank you, Bill Knott.

…oh, and just in case you didn’t already know:

Often while riding my bike through the alleys and streets of Chicago, my mind gathers the imagery and often peeks through the windows of neighbors and strangers. I began collecting these images in drawings and later making them into relief prints, carving linoleum to create my pieces with a sharp, clean illustrative quality. However, I found these prints to read as static and flat, and as much as I loved the process of carving and multiples, I was not as interested in creating editions. To remedy this, and to make further use of the vocabulary of imagery I had amassed, I began to cut and collage the prints, making them more dynamic. I was able to change the colors and create arrangements that were completely unique even if I repeated motifs from piece to piece. The end result combines the things I love the most: the bouncing imagery and stream of consciousness of city life, drawing and carving.

My work is principally concerned with contemporary man’s mutable conception of Nature. Growing up on the rural Delmarva Peninsula, I became acquainted with the local flora and fauna at a young age. Whether working at field chores, hunting, fishing or simply playing, many of my experiences in the “natural” world were similar to those of Lewis Carroll’s Alice; Carroll’s premise, that “things get curiouser and curiouser,” guided me through many a childhood adventure. I anthropomorphized animals and cast them as key players in an epic production, of which I too was a part. For me, as for Alice, the natural world was enchanted and, although by no means idyllic, ethical in an unsentimental way.

As I matured, however, my childhood love of Nature evolved into a fascination with biology and ethology, an intellectual ontogenesis like that impelled by the Enlightenment. In the 16th century, educated Europeans began to distinguish between storied meaning and fact. They gradually abandoned enchantment, myth, and magic in favor of analysis and rigorous experimentation, hallmarks of the scientific method. This preference holds true today. Yet, incidentally, we’ve realized that this divide between the imagination and reason is unfortunate, even unnatural. The English poet and critic, John Ruskin, alluded to this schism when he wrote of “the broken harmonies of fact and fancy, thought and feeling, and truth and faith.” Although we learn an increasing number of facts about Nature, our experience of it is less complete.

For our ancestors, Nature was understood as an extension of self. Both the man and the rock he sat on were part of the same rich story, a story in which every player — a wolf, eagle, tree, mountain, river — had a voice. Art and dream acted as a channel between human consciousness and animal or natural phenomena. Today, many people dismiss such “primitive” spiritualism, but, as critic Donald Kuspit writes, “while it is hard to know what is special about nature in our increasingly unnatural world, and to recognize that we remain part of it however removed from it we think we are, we continue, however unconsciously, to feel the need for a passionate, unpressured relationship with [nature] as an antidote to the daily pressure of our lives.”

The existential experience we channel when contemplating animal behavior or participating fully in the world is altogether distinct from the more nuanced world of advanced self-consciousness and technological civilization. We humans are exceptional creatures and our extraordinary accomplishments should be celebrated, not diminished, yet Nature affords us an opportunity to confront denial of our animal antecedence, to increase wonder and joy, and to extract lessons of mortality and morality. Ethology, the study of our animal brethren, is inextricably entangled with anthropology; this knot binds essential truths.

The current body of work is borne of these ideas and questions, but also responds to our contemporary cultural and political climate. The paintings are celebrations of Nature, but they also respond to the anxiety and uncertainty endemic to our time by returning to the traditional Sublime, picturing an ambivalent world that delights and inspires as surely as it destroys and awes. They depict a melting world, a Nature torn apart and dissolving. But this dissolution is also an opening of the senses, the seepage of magic and mystery back into the picture. The drawings are similarly alchemical, poetic investigations of belonging (or not) to the greater whole.

The working title for this ongoing series of paintings was “Crate”. The subject of a figure in a box originated from a search for an image to represent the escapologist which could take its place beside various circus performers in a suite called “Smoke & Mirrors” . However, the works may now be considered as a stand-alone project. The composition of figure physically enclosed within the confines of the frame should also be regarded as a visual metaphor for

A] social isolation

B] political oppression

C] high risk strategies employed in acts of voluntary and coerced, illegal human trafficking across continents.

The paintings are all squares in format, with dimensions ranging from 10cm to 92cm, and have all been painted and designed to hang any way up. The works preview later this year and the pictures will be rotated by 90 and 180 degrees at the start of each day so that the exhibition re-invents itself visually throughout the run.