Clive Knights', The Wholeness of Fragments will run from Nov 2 - Dec 2 | Tuesday - Saturday from 11:00 am - 5:30 pm
Crafted and curated by our own Architecture Professor, Clive Knights, this is his third solo exhibition at Laura Vincent's gallery in as many years, this time showing new collage work created this summer both in Portland and France. The over-arching presumption of his creative endeavors is of a singular, shared cosmos of which we humans are ineluctably ensconced and which claims us. By virtue of our bodily participation and confronted by the common limitations of our body's perceptual capacities, and their limited reach, we are destined to represent that originary oneness to each other through the intermediary language of gathered fragments, shards of a broken vessel, the full nature of which our human imaginations anxiously attempt to recreate by bringing the pieces back together in new and elaborate ways, meeting places for a diversity of contributors. In making new work, he hopes, at least, to incant by an analogical gesture a sense of the common whole, even while accepting, with an all-too-human melancholic joy, the futility of that task.
Who is Clive Knights?
Clive’s primary area of research and creative exploration addresses the cultural meanings of poetic representation understood through the phenomenology of the human body, with particular reference to the writings of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. From this research arises his conviction that creativity engages most effectively with the depth of the human condition through a gestural engagement with graphic material, epitomized in acts of drawing and making by hand.
His publications include many journal articles and book chapters on the theory, history and pedagogy of creative practice, and most recently two articles reflecting on his studio practice published in Kolaj Magazine. He has exhibited creative work internationally, including three projects at the 1985 Venice Biennale. Over recent years, he has put deliberate effort into engaging the printmaking and collage-making communities nationally and beyond, exhibiting his work in over 30 juried group shows across eighteen US states plus Belgium, Scotland, Slovenia, England, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Norway, Austria, and Canada. In Portland, he is represented by Laura Vincent Design & Gallery. Follow him on Instagram @knightsclive