Team Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures by Ross Knight. The exhibition will run from the 29th of November 2007 through the 5th of January 2008. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.
Ross Knight’s rickety constructions have a slightly mad charm about them. These contradictory sculptures seem to have been frozen at precisely the moment when their component parts first came together or, conversely, in the instant before they completely fall apart. They hold together just barely, but in a form that also appears to be inevitable. Not only are Knight’s materials always in tenuous balance, but their meaning is composed of diametrically opposed impulses and values that court destabilization–they are both epic and diminutive; sprawling and weightless; elegant and sloppy; poetic and insulting; brilliant and idiotic; considered and thrown away.
Akin to three-dimensional drawings in space, Knight’s sculptures wrestle with notions of authenticity, ephemerality and severity. Without taking themselves too seriously, Knight’s rigorous and carefully cobbled together constructions reference a battery of practices. How do three-dimensional objects always invoke the functional and in what way does Knight parody these implications? What exactly is a primary structure; what is secondary?
Like minimalist masterworks turned over to the likes of Jacques Tati or Buster Keaton, Knight creates ludicrous balancing acts of sensual, yet debased, materials which are both machined and quirked-out. Among the sculptors whose works immediately come to mind are Robert Grosvenor, David Smith, Alexander Calder and Panamarenko, although Knight’s pieces also appear artless, absent of such dignified references. These are pratfall sculptures, but like the work of slapstick’s most accomplished practitioners, such as Chaplin, they hide an exacting intelligence and a tremendous skill.
This is Knight’s fifth one-person show at Team. He has exhibited his work extensively in group exhibitions throughout Europe and the US.
