NYAB Event - Ross Knight “Human Stuff”

Ross Knight “Human Stuff”

Team Gallery

This event has ended.

Team (gallery, inc.) announces a solo show by New York-based sculptor Ross Knight. Team (gallery, inc.) is located at 83 Grand Street, between Greene and Wooster, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will house a one-person exhibition by Carina Brandes.

For this exhibition, Ross Knight presents a brand new show of sculpture, including intimately scaled works displayed individually, as well as larger floor pieces. The artworks evoke both the human body and man-made mechanical objects, exploring the frictional territory between the animal and the artificial. Through their unusual and specific composition and discernably calculated design, many of the pieces deceptively evoke functionality, suggesting a use-value that quickly dissipates upon closer consideration. Others absurdly appropriate the structure of jewelry displays, slyly isolating taken-for-granted modes of presentation, as well as drawing attention to the body of work’s own peculiar delicacy, appreciable in spite of the evidently industrial nature of its constituent materials.

While Knight’s past exhibitions have been characterized by a certain degree of bluntly ostentatious visual dynamism – containing luminous neon shades and monumentally scaled works – these pieces are decidedly more restrained, both in scale and color. His palette is confined to pale pinks and neutrals – the pigments of the body, of flesh and bone – and few exceed a square foot in size. While less visually flamboyant, Knight’s subtle penchant for bawdy innuendo remains, as does his imaginative sense of form and material. In shedding those Pop-inspired elements of his aesthetic, he imbues the work with an ironic impression of refinement and preciousness.

The sculptures in this exhibition are comprised of raw, industrial materials – chrome steel, polyethylene, platinum silicone rubber, urethane, plaster gauze – as well as more recognizable found commercial objects – a knee brace, a pull chain, suction cups, underarm deodorant. The potential to “misuse” material is a central tenant of Knight’s practice; there is a meticulous, near-scientific sense of exploration to the work. The works’ titles – Bead Chain (skin replacement) Stand, or (6Lb) Fat/Mallet Replica – reflect the investigative nature of the artist’s process, legible as methodologies – the ingredients to an experiment for his mysterious sculptural hypotheses.

The work finds formal precedent in the human body as well the recent history of sculpture, while unconditionally avoiding mimetic or formal mimicry. With Minimalism, they share a fetishistic enthusiasm for surface, but opt for more alien material and non-geometric forms. Owing to the likes of Richard Serra, Eva Hesse and Robert Morris a concern with gravity, mass and volume, the sculptures gracefully confound assumptions about the ways in which objects can occupy space. Knight’s practice is likewise informed by the progenerative nature of all acts of making, the connection between the reproductive drive and artistic production – a notion explicated via his visual allusions to the bodily and, specifically, the sexual.