“Notes from the Lightship" Karla Knight
Knight operates in an abstract, pseudo-scientific realm. Within her extraordinary diagrammatic paintings and drawings, she incorporates imagined signs and symbols that seem to communicate to unknown worlds. The artist grew up in a household where the existence of supernatural forces was readily accepted: Her father was an author of books on UFOs, the occult and ESP. Her interactions with her own child inspired her to construct a hieroglyphic vocabulary, which she has developed and refined over the last twenty years.
As her five-year old son learned to read and write, the artist noticed that he would make mistakes and then invent letters and words that seemed close to what he had memorized and was trying to recall. Connecting this process with her own artistic sensibility, she thought how interesting it might be to follow his lead and create a language that had no definitive meaning but might be understood by nameless others.
Starting with a ground of collaged sheets of ledger paper mounted on linen, Knight draws and paints a network of hieroglyphic characters and interlocking rectangular forms that resemble the floorplans for houses, stores, malls and airports. The backgrounds reference Jasper Johns’ crosshatch mark-making, while her solid shapes are more machinelike and bring to mind toys, logos and cartoon characters, and the Dadaist forms of Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Francis Picabia.
The artist’s elements and techniques play off of one another — flat, hard-edged forms bring the viewer’s eye to the surface of the work, while scumbled brushstrokes, crosshatching, hieroglyphic letters and intersecting lines that recall rural roads on a county map cause parts of the picture planes to recede, creating a dynamic and thought-provoking push/pull graphic effect. The surface holds the eye captive, but the positioning of an element or two (usually those 3D orbs that date back to her earliest works) send us into deep space.
“It’s not about deciphering the work or the language,” Knight says about her art. “It’s about living with the unknown.” Imagining her own solar systems, the spaceships to transport us and a language to communicate with whomever might be out there, she guides us through an open portal on a visual voyage to another place.
Words and images via Edlin Gallery.
