Clive Knights, professor in the School of Architecture, has a series of collages and monotypes on view in his exhibition titled “Autochthonous Cities and Other Limital Works” at Laura Vincent Design and Gallery in Portland. The show will be open through October 12, 2021, with a closing reception on First Thursday, October 7.
A dedicated practitioner of the art of drawing and collage as a means of exploring architectural space, textures, materiality, relationships and the human condition, Knights devoted his recent sabbatical to making collages, drawings and other works of art.
The artist’s statement for the exhibition expresses Knights’s perspective on the value of drawing and collage, an excerpt of which follows:
“The artist and cultural commentator John Berger has said, “We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.”
I maintain that the work presented in this show is the outcome of such acts of drawing, despite the fact that it is an exhibition of collages and monotypes. I consider each work to be the offspring of a ‘drawing out’, a cultivation of sorts, a tillage of predominantly found materials that, in the spontaneity and hard graft of the art-making activity, coalesce their visual and semantic nutrients into new figurative outgrowths, rootings and sproutings, interments and dehiscences.
The Autochthonous Cities, in particular, are the result of a kind of stewardship, on my part, of intimations of newly born landscapes and settlements as they emerge from the detritus of print media produced by civil society. They are fictions, for sure, since the cities are only implied in the pushing and pulling of matter above and below the surface, that edge between earth and atmosphere, soil and air, the chthonic and the celestial, where human life plays out. But, if you let your imagination run free across the topography of each work, you’ll encounter the nascent evidence of transformation, the continuing duet of entropy and cultivation: building and dilapidating, constructing and excavating, piling and hollowing, towering and penetrating, reaching and nesting.”
Learn more about Knights’s work in an interview on The Weird Show.
The show has also been featured in Kolaj Magazine.
The exhibition is open through October 12, Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M., with a closing reception on First Thursday, October 7, 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. Laura Vincent Design and Gallery is located at 824 NW Davis Street, Portland.