OPENING RECEPTION
November 1st, 6-8 pm
Free and open to the public for two days only!
Exhibition is open Saturday, November 2nd, 12 - 6 pm.
November 1st, 6-8 pm
Free and open to the public for two days only!
Exhibition is open Saturday, November 2nd, 12 - 6 pm.
Artist Statement :
EEEEE Pluribus is a late edition phantasmagoria. I wanted to blast a ‘Pluribus’ of kinetic images and sounds into the cavernous, Westwood gallery space. From Latin, ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ is the motto on the Seal of the United States. ‘Pluribus’ means the ‘many.’ The ‘EEEEE’ is an extension of the ‘e’ in ‘e pluribus’, meaning ‘out of’’, the many’ shards of image and sound shrapnel that are created by the cacophony of information is the ‘unum’: all is one. The two screen projected piece is titled E Pluribus Unum. There are four other new and recent works on flat screens throughout the gallery. The works are cyclically structured. They loop. ‘Electric Paintings’, Scott MacDonald calls them.
I am a sign painter. Now the signs have lost their meaning. I have always been interested in the dialectic of ‘horror’ and ‘’humor’, ‘Ha – ha!’/’Oh No!’. The synthesis of that will continue develop over the remaining years of our lives, and beyond. In these whirlwind, late days of a presidential election, the outcome of which threatens to crack the ‘unum’, scatter the “pluribus” and make the “e” into a “screeeeem” weighs on me as I draw and edit this onslaught.
There is a whirling dervish of plastic shrapnel and electro magnetic shards of information swirling through us like a category 4 hurricane set on “Repeat”.
We live in a constant, non-stop rush of things. The swirl of humanity is living in a complete electronic space. Jean Baudrillard told us, forty years ago that we are becoming one with the media. Time is determined by the furrow of the media day. Identity is determined by the piling up and arranging of the visual data points, be they particles of grain, pixels or shouts. We are dancing and wrestling to the nonstop beat of late simulacra. But as another ghost from the past told us: ‘Nothing is real.’.
That being said, none of the images or sounds in this EEEEE Pluribus installation are media images. None were made with a camera. They are all hand drawn on paper with a pencil, or with a mouse on Photoshop, frame by frame. The frame by frame construction of the work comes from my love of early, 19th Cent. motion picture experiments. Now William Dickson has moved from Edison’s kitchen to Musk’s augmented reality farm.
EEEEE Pluribus is a late edition phantasmagoria. I wanted to blast a ‘Pluribus’ of kinetic images and sounds into the cavernous, Westwood gallery space. From Latin, ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ is the motto on the Seal of the United States. ‘Pluribus’ means the ‘many.’ The ‘EEEEE’ is an extension of the ‘e’ in ‘e pluribus’, meaning ‘out of’’, the many’ shards of image and sound shrapnel that are created by the cacophony of information is the ‘unum’: all is one. The two screen projected piece is titled E Pluribus Unum. There are four other new and recent works on flat screens throughout the gallery. The works are cyclically structured. They loop. ‘Electric Paintings’, Scott MacDonald calls them.
I am a sign painter. Now the signs have lost their meaning. I have always been interested in the dialectic of ‘horror’ and ‘’humor’, ‘Ha – ha!’/’Oh No!’. The synthesis of that will continue develop over the remaining years of our lives, and beyond. In these whirlwind, late days of a presidential election, the outcome of which threatens to crack the ‘unum’, scatter the “pluribus” and make the “e” into a “screeeeem” weighs on me as I draw and edit this onslaught.
There is a whirling dervish of plastic shrapnel and electro magnetic shards of information swirling through us like a category 4 hurricane set on “Repeat”.
We live in a constant, non-stop rush of things. The swirl of humanity is living in a complete electronic space. Jean Baudrillard told us, forty years ago that we are becoming one with the media. Time is determined by the furrow of the media day. Identity is determined by the piling up and arranging of the visual data points, be they particles of grain, pixels or shouts. We are dancing and wrestling to the nonstop beat of late simulacra. But as another ghost from the past told us: ‘Nothing is real.’.
That being said, none of the images or sounds in this EEEEE Pluribus installation are media images. None were made with a camera. They are all hand drawn on paper with a pencil, or with a mouse on Photoshop, frame by frame. The frame by frame construction of the work comes from my love of early, 19th Cent. motion picture experiments. Now William Dickson has moved from Edison’s kitchen to Musk’s augmented reality farm.
BIO :
John Knecht has been a practicing film and video artist since 1973. His films, videos and multiple channel installations have been shown widely. Knecht’s video “The Possible Fog of Heaven, 1993, was featured in an article by Cory Archangel in the May, 2023 issue of Artforum, His most recent animation, “Curiosities From the Anthropocene”, 2020 was slelected for the 2021 Athens International Film and Video Festival and the 2021 RPM Festival. It was screened in March 2022 in San Francisco at the Other Cinema. His 2010 animation “Deluge” was included in the 2021 “Straight Through the Wall” series in New York, which projected videos on various buildings around Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Most recent solo exhibitions: John Knecht and Russel Scott Day at Alexander Heath Contemporary, Roanoke, Virginia, March 2024; “after math”, Alexander/Heath Contemporary, Website, 2017; “Animating Destiny: Electric Paintings and Other Works”, at the Esther Massry Gallery of the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. 2016; other recent exhibitions include “Considering the Probability of Divine Intervention”, a five channel video installation at the Llewellyn Gallery at Alfred State College; “Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel”, a fifteen channel installation at the Everson Museum, Syracuse; four animation panels from that series were purchased by the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, in Utica, NY, for its permanent collection. 205 Hudson Street Gallery, NYC, “A History of the Experimental Television Center”; Westbeth Gallery, NYC “Triacontagon: 30 Years of the Artists Fellowship Program at NYFA; The “Urban Video Project”, an undertaking of, Syracuse University, Light Works Gallery and the Everson Museum; One Person Screening at Union Docs. “First Person Cinema” series, University of Colorado, Boulder; “Making Movies”, Schweinfurth Art Museum; The @ LAB, Ohio Univeristy; The Tou Scene Contemporary Art Center in Stavanger, Norway, the Vienna Film Festival, Bard College, the Mix Festival, NYC; Cine Probe, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
John Knecht holds the Russell Colgate Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History and Film and Media Studies Chair, Emeritus at Colgate University. Knecht lives and Works in Hubbardsville, New York.
Johnknechtart.com
John Knecht has been a practicing film and video artist since 1973. His films, videos and multiple channel installations have been shown widely. Knecht’s video “The Possible Fog of Heaven, 1993, was featured in an article by Cory Archangel in the May, 2023 issue of Artforum, His most recent animation, “Curiosities From the Anthropocene”, 2020 was slelected for the 2021 Athens International Film and Video Festival and the 2021 RPM Festival. It was screened in March 2022 in San Francisco at the Other Cinema. His 2010 animation “Deluge” was included in the 2021 “Straight Through the Wall” series in New York, which projected videos on various buildings around Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Most recent solo exhibitions: John Knecht and Russel Scott Day at Alexander Heath Contemporary, Roanoke, Virginia, March 2024; “after math”, Alexander/Heath Contemporary, Website, 2017; “Animating Destiny: Electric Paintings and Other Works”, at the Esther Massry Gallery of the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. 2016; other recent exhibitions include “Considering the Probability of Divine Intervention”, a five channel video installation at the Llewellyn Gallery at Alfred State College; “Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel”, a fifteen channel installation at the Everson Museum, Syracuse; four animation panels from that series were purchased by the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, in Utica, NY, for its permanent collection. 205 Hudson Street Gallery, NYC, “A History of the Experimental Television Center”; Westbeth Gallery, NYC “Triacontagon: 30 Years of the Artists Fellowship Program at NYFA; The “Urban Video Project”, an undertaking of, Syracuse University, Light Works Gallery and the Everson Museum; One Person Screening at Union Docs. “First Person Cinema” series, University of Colorado, Boulder; “Making Movies”, Schweinfurth Art Museum; The @ LAB, Ohio Univeristy; The Tou Scene Contemporary Art Center in Stavanger, Norway, the Vienna Film Festival, Bard College, the Mix Festival, NYC; Cine Probe, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
John Knecht holds the Russell Colgate Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History and Film and Media Studies Chair, Emeritus at Colgate University. Knecht lives and Works in Hubbardsville, New York.
Johnknechtart.com
