Wednesday, November 6th, ISSUE presents American poet and painter Christopher Knowles reading new poetry and playing vinyl records. Knowles’s performance departs from an art practice broader than any classification suggests—spanning text, sound, painting, drawing, sculpture, and recorded performance. Choreographer, performer, and 2018 Artist-In-Residence Will Rawls also presents a new iteration of his Cursor project, a practice taking the multifarious figure of the cursor as a guideline to investigate his work that encompasses dance, writing, voice, and objects. As Knowles’s ISSUE debut, the evening highlights both artists’ unique and interdisciplinary approaches to text and sound.
Christopher Knowles’s works record and reorder the everyday materials around us through the use of incantatory rhythms and repetitions. His practice includes typewritten drawings of language permutations, reimagined song lyrics, and painting. In the words of writer Jeff Goldberg, “Knowles’s response to the frenzied world around him is to construct islands of visual and auditory play in its midst. In his art [...] concrete facts, numbers, and patterns are basic elements that not only ground him in the world, but are a source of delight. His work can be disconcerting and strange, but is so imbued with Knowles’s ebullient energy that it’s always enchanting—and fun.”
Will Rawls’ presentation of Cursor was partly developed during his 2018 ISSUE residency.
Cursor
Like the queen piece in chess
they move up, down, forward, back,
across the field of the text, but
are not the text.
They speak tongues.
They err on purpose.
They misspell perceptions.
They run.
Bodies motivated by language,
by users,
by others.
They dance.
Christopher Knowles was born in 1959 and had his first solo exhibition in 1974. The impressive body of work that he has built over the past four decades includes his signature typed works on paper, paintings, tape recordings, poems, and live performances. Since the 1970s, he has been collaborating closely with the theater director and playwright Robert Wilson. While still a teenager, Knowles appeared in Wilson’s 1973 production of The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin and in subsequent years contributed to many of Wilson’s key early productions, such as A Letter for Queen Victoria and Einstein on the Beach, for which Knowles wrote the libretto. Recently, Knowles’ 1975 piece The Sundance Kid Is Beautiful was re-staged at CUNY’s Segal Center (2012) and at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (2013). His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including MoMA’s Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language (2013). A solo exhibition of typings and audio works opened at Le Fonoteca Nacional, México, D.F. in February 2015, and a major survey of his work was presented at the ICA, Philadelphia in September 2015 (curated by Anthony Elms and Hilton Als).
Will Rawls is a New York-based choreographer, performer and writer. His practice engages dance and multiple other media to investigate poetics of blackness, ambiguity and abstraction. His work has appeared at the MoMA and MoMA PS1; MCA, Chicago; Danspace Project; New Museum of Contemporary Art; Issue Project Room; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; Walker Arts Center. At Danspace Project, he co-curated Lost and Found, comprised of performances and artist projects focused on the intergenerational impact of HIV/AIDS on dancers, women, and people of color. His writing has been published by Artforum International, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Modern Art. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Rauschenberg Residency and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. He teaches and lectures widely in university, community and festival contexts.