the work
A tree's shape is a visual record of its life-long dialogue--by turns intense, pleasant, balanced, deprived, sporadic and short--with the noble elements of water, sun, and earth. The exploded-tire fragments I am working with likewise acquire their design by way of many, if less noble factors: the laws of physics and chaos that apply to the blown-apart pieces; the stresses on rubber and steel; the difference of the rubbers employed throughout the tires; and the nature of the impact that caused the blow-out. Furthermore, once scattered over the road, a fragment is repeatedly exposed to weather extremes and to the forces of being run over by cars and trucks which alter its shape; and the gathering together of fragments into a mass is, in turn, subjected to the above processes. In its discovered state, we can see the rubber--like the tree-- has assumed the shape of its biography. That's where my work begins.
commentary
"The raw material of William Knight's recent work are the shreds of blown-out tires, skeins of black rubber left for loss at the sides of our nation's highways. What results after a countless iteration of fine judgments--testing thicknesses against contour against overarching gesture, spacings and conjunctions and negative space considered from all angles of view--is a pure calligraphy of spirit enacted in a real space made vibrant. The works operate in two ways: mounted off walls as seemingly impromptu, open-form reliefs, using the white backdrop as a visual foil--a kind of haiku of line, space and gesture, cursively alive and adventurous within the shallow volume of space that the piece itself defines; or, delicately suspended from ceiling height. These turn subtly with air currents, and, changing constantly as one moves 360 degrees around them, remarkably hold a tautness and tightness of expression from manifold vantage points."
James Dinerstein
interview
Interviewer: Do you have a vision for your work?
Knight: "Work as removed as possible from any automatic or conventional response I may have, and from conscious taste, and from unconscious reference to the work of others. I like involuntary stuff, and I'm after sculpture satisfying to the strange and surprising territory of the inner eye."
Interviewer: " Would you give us your personal definition of art?"
Knight: "Non-visual communication. All sculpture, of course, is visual, and it can reflect hundreds of choices made by the sculptor, according to one's aesthetic. If the sculpture and the viewer connect through a work's visual emotion, the sculpture becomes "art." That communication is non-visual. That's the art part, and the power of art."
"About the Artist," Pulse Magazine
shows
A large sculpture, Wall Tapestry, was recently on a six-month loan to the Textile Museum in Washington, DC. One person exhibitions include those at Princeton University, the Johnson Art Center in Connecticut, the Widener University Art Gallery, the Gallery at Schering-Plough, the Center for Experiential Psychotherapy of New York, the Gallery at R & F in Kingston, NY, the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, NY, the Perkins Center for the Arts, Collingswood, NJ, and the Knapp Gallery in Philadelphia. His drawings are included in the Drawing Center collection at MOMA.
art education
Knight studied at the New York Studio School of Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the National Academy of Design in New York, and privately with Washington color-painters Sylvia Hamers and Joy Turner Luke, as well as with Mel Leipzig and Dominic Antonelli.
life
"In high school, I thought I'd become a politician, and served as a page in the House of Representatives in Washington. Then, at Harvard and MIT, I thought I'd become a teacher. Then I thought I'd be a writer after I had some short stories published. Then I realized I was an artist and that has lasted thirty years."
William Knight