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Mar 05

slow jam: active restfulness is its own kind of money

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Please note: this workshop will be facilitated remotely

Due to rising concerns amid the COVID-19 virus, Knockdown Center will be temporarily closed to the public from March 14th through April 1st, 2020. It is with a heavy heart that we announce this news, however, we hope that this measure will ensure the safety of our staff and guests.

In conjunction with the exhibition Catalina Oyuang: it has always been the perfect instrument, dancer and performer Lu Yim leads a workshop in the gallery titled slow jam: active restfulness is its own kind of money.

In this sixty-minute movement workshop, participants will be led through a variety of breathing and somatic movement meditations to bring the nervous system to a more restful state. From this restful state the workshop will flow into an open movement jam, with feeling, sensation, and rejuvenative ease as a point of departure. Participants will be asked to work together to create a calm and restful atmosphere and to overall support the group’s interiority and individuals’ process, in order to experience the activity of rest and restful activity as an act of value making and reclaiming.

Space is limited, please RSVP to alexis@knockdowncenter.com.
Once signed up, you’ll get more information on what to wear and bring. We will ensure any access requests are met to the best of Knockdown Center’s ability.


About the exhibition
Catalina Ouyang: it has always been the perfect instrument presents sculptures made over the last two years alongside a new two-channel video installation that comprises Ouyang’s reordering of the nearly 40,000 words generated by the contributions to [Conclusion and Findings]. The works in the exhibition, however, instead grow out of a space where language fails and in resisting any overarching material, disciplinary, or tonal vocabulary, it has always been the perfect instrument trades linguistic and taxonomic control for a landscape of rhythm, texture, touch, and communion.

About Lu Yim
Lu Yim is a dance and performance maker based in Brooklyn, NY. They arrived at somatic movement forms from their own interest and experiences in trauma and chronic pain and have studied many perspectives and ideas around the subject from the Postural Restoration Institute, yoga, the Alexander Technique, et al. They are part of visual and performance collaborations Physical Education and Pidzn Club, and are currently working with artists Tingying Ma and Nam Pham. Lu is a certified Gyrotonic Teacher and Personal Trainer and holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College (‘19).

Feb 26

Correspondence Table [POSTPONED]

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Due to rising concerns amid the COVID-19 virus, Knockdown Center will be temporarily closed to the public. It is with a heavy heart that we announce this news, however, we hope that this measure will ensure the safety of our staff and guests. Please check back for updates and rescheduled events.

Correspondence Table is a program organized in conjunction with Laurel Sparks’ FiftyTwo Ft. commission titled Quad Relay. Sparks and sound artist Shawn E. Hansen maintain a collaboration that explores correspondences between sound, poetry, chance and visual systems. The artists will discuss their methods of using mathematical poetry, dice, string figures, sound and symbols to generate unpredictable structures. They will screen an excerpt from a video-in-progress that combines Hansen’s related sound and photos with their collaborative poems. The evening will conclude with a live sound performance by Hansen using historic Just Intonation and immersive drone systems to translate elements from Quad Relay.

About FiftyTwo Ft: Laurel Sparks

Quad Relay by Laurel Sparks is the most recent work in Knockdown Center’s FiftyTwo Ft. series of commissioned wall-based artworks in the East Corridor. Quad Relay is the artist’s largest work to date, and its compositional logic is derived from the sestina, a complex form of mathematical poetry structured by six stanzas organized in numbered sequences. Sparks assigns points and directional lines specific colors, numbers, and elements according to the sestina’s structure, creating a self-generating algorithm that determines the painting’s geometric tableaux. An irregular grid underlies the composition, producing an almost kinetic, shimmering presence akin to dazzle camouflage, refusing fixed identity and yielding instead to perceptual flux. Learn more about the work here.

About the presenters

Shawn E Hansen is a composer, improviser, phonographer, and piano technician. His main instruments include synthesizer, organ, piano, and saxophone. He is the 2018 Charlotte Street Performing Arts Fellow. Practicing his own style of Great-Plains hermetic art known as Tangential Assertivism, he performs with Neal Wilson (L.A.), Chris Forsyth (PA), Laurel Sparks (NY), and makes films with Cyrus Console. Tangential Assertivism is the practice of observing the relationship between disparate thought-objects placed in close proximity spatially or temporally. Shawn runs KJEA-radio, a transmitted conceptual space first broadcast in 1984. He studied with Maryanne Amacher, Richard Teitelbaum, George Lewis, and Pauline Oliveros at Bard in 2001.

Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work embodies geometric symbol systems and the transmitting potential of pattern and materiality. She holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston, MA. Her exhibitions include solo shows at Kate Werble, NYC and group shows at Cheim and Read NYC; LX, NYC; Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, NYC; Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; Berman Museum at Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA; Elizabeth Foundation Gallery, NYC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Art In General, NYC.

Feb 19

Open Call: Exhibitions and Main Spaces

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We are currently seeking proposals for Group Exhibitions in our gallery space, Solo Projects + Installations in our gallery space, and short-term Main Spaces Projects!

Review the guidelines for open calls for gallery exhibitions and projects in our main spaces, and apply by December 6, 2020!

Take a look below or on our proposal page for full details and guidelines, or download a PDF of the guidelines here.

Submit your proposal here.

Proposal Guidelines

About the Exhibition Program – Group Exhibitions

The Group Exhibition Open Call provides curators the resources to organize group exhibitions (two or more artists) in our gallery space. Knockdown Center provides an exhibition stipend to cover curator and artist honorarium in addition to costs associated with shipping, materials, publications, and programming. Exhibitions are typically 6 – 8 weeks and allotted 5 days to install.

Knockdown Center Gallery Exhibition Budget Guidelines – Group Exhibition
Curatorial Honorarium: Curators receive a $500 curatorial honorarium per exhibition. In the case of a co-curated exhibition, the curatorial honoraria is divided between curators.
Artist Honoraria: Each artist included in an exhibition receives a $100 honorarium.
Shipping, Material, or Production Costs: KDC will reimburse up to $500 upon the submission of receipts for:

– Artwork shipping
– Material costs for special installation needs

Programming: KDC offers $400 to support exhibition-related programs. Programs may include but are not limited to: panel discussions, screenings, readings, performances, or a closing reception.

Knockdown Center Support
Knockdown Center provides the following exhibition-related support:

– Art handler for installation and de-installation up to 22 hours.
– Fine Art Insurance coverage for all dates of the exhibition.
– Title vinyl production and installation.
– Marketing support.
– In-house installation photography.

Please consider the floorplans when imagining your project:
Download Gallery Floorplans Here

About the Exhibition Program – Solo Projects and Installations

The Solo Projects and Installations Open Call provides interdisciplinary artists and collectives the resources to develop and present a new body of work or site-specific installation in our gallery space. Artists will work in closely with Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art to develop and realize proposed projects. Knockdown Center provides an exhibition stipend to cover artist honorarium in addition to costs associated with shipping, materials, publications, and programming. Exhibitions are typically 6 – 8 weeks, and allotted 5 days to install.

Knockdown Center Gallery Exhibition Budget Guidelines – Solo Projects and installations
Artist Honorarium: Artists receive a $500 curatorial honorarium per exhibition. In the case of a co-produced project, the honoraria is divided between artists.
Shipping, Material, or Production Costs: KDC will reimburse up to $500 upon the submission of receipts for:

– Artwork shipping
– Material costs for special installation needs

Programming: KDC offers $400 to support exhibition-related programs. Programs may include but are not limited to: panel discussions, screenings, readings, performances, or a closing reception.

Knockdown Center Support
Knockdown Center provides the following exhibition-related support:

– Curatorial support from Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.
– Art handler for installation and de-installation up to 22 hours.
– Fine Art Insurance coverage for all dates of the exhibition.
– Title vinyl production and installation.
– Marketing support.
– In-house installation photography.

Please consider the floorplans when imagining your project:
Download Gallery Floorplans Here

About Main Spaces Projects and Application Process

Knockdown Center’s Main Spaces are our most active spaces. Because they are in extremely high demand, projects proposing for the Main Spaces should plan to use them as efficiently as possible, and should not exceed 2 weeks in duration. Main Space projects can take the form of large-scale temporary installations, dance, theater, readings, talks, screenings, conferences, etc.

The Main Spaces proposal is a multi-step process. In the first round, we invite artists and organizers to submit a letter of intent describing the project they wish to produce. After a first round of reviews, a shortlist of selected applicants will be invited to submit a more detailed proposal, and the opportunity to engage in a more in-depth conversation with Knockdown Center’s staff about the nature of the space and what kind of support Knockdown Center can offer to realize the proposed project.

Please consider the following logistical factors and spatial limitations when conceptualizing your proposal:
– The Main Spaces are in extremely high demand and should be used as efficiently as possible. Developmental residencies and extended rehearsal periods are therefore not feasible.
– The Main Spaces are open-plan, multi-use, and often shared.
– The Main Spaces receive abundant natural night. Please consider this aspect of the space when conceptualizing multi-day projects that might require light control such as video and light installations.

Please consider the floorplans when imagining your project:
Download Floorplans Here

Feb 11

Pixelated Petals [POSTPONED]

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Postponed: Due to rising concerns amid the COVID-19 virus, Knockdown Center will be temporarily closed to the public. It is with a heavy heart that we announce this news, however, we hope that this measure will ensure the safety of our staff and guests. Please check back for updates on rescheduled dates.

Pixelated Petals is an evening organized in conjunction with the exhibition Dakota Gearhart: The Sextant of the Rose. Through lecture, video, and performance, Eva Davidova, Mo Kong, and Cori Olinghouse will unravel some of the conceptual threads within Gearhart’s exhibition like environmental collapse, digital and material promiscuity, and embodied absurdity.

Interdisciplinary artist Eva Davidova will give a short presentation of her VR and animation works, which use interactivity and mythological characters to address ecological disaster, cruelty and manipulation of information. Artist Mo Kong is propelled by scientific research and often addresses environmental collapse. Kong will present See Sun, and Think the Shadow (2017), a video of accumulated imagery of sinkholes and earthly openings. Embodying a humor-driven and queer performance practice, artist Cori Olinghouse performs a selection of new and returning characters in dialogue with Gearhart’s installation.

About the exhibition
Dakota Gearhart: The Sextant of the Rose investigates beauty as economic capital through the ubiquitous figure of the rose, speculating on whether the rose may have a hidden evolutionary agenda of its own. This exhibition, the artist’s first solo presentation in New York, features a new series of video-sculptures that incorporate psychedelic videos as well as living and dying roses to create an immersive world that viewers can become submerged within.

About the presenters

Eva Davidova is a Spanish/Bulgarian interdisciplinary artist with focus on new media(s), information, and their socio-political implications. The issues of her work—behavior, cruelty, ecological disaster and manipulation of information emerge as paradoxes rather than assumptions, in an almost fairy-tale fashion. Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum, the Everson Museum the Albright Knox Museum, MACBA Barcelona, CAAC Sevilla, Instituto Cervantes Sofia, La Regenta and Circulo de Bellas Artes Madrid among others.

Mo Kong is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher.They have been the subject of solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, Artericambi Gallery, Gertrude Gallery and Chashama. Their work has been included in Queens Museum, RISD Museum,SFMOMA, Minnesota Street Project, Spring Break, ARTISSIMA, Make Room Gallery and Rubber Factory Gallery. They also received fellowship/residency from Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Triangle art association,Mass Moca Studio,Vermont Studio Center, Gibney Performance Center and AAI. Their work mentioned in Hyperallergic, Artforum, Cultured magazine, Artnews, CoBo Social, Wall street International, SFMoMA Public Knowledge.

Cori Olinghouse is an interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and curator, who received her MA in Performance Curation from Wesleyan University. Olinghouse performed for the Trisha Brown Dance Company for several years and participated in a dancing dialogue with theatrical clown and actor Bill Irwin, researching a variety of improvisation forms that explore shape-shifting and transformation. Her performance works have been commissioned by BRIC Arts Media, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Movement Research. Last year, she collaborated with video artist Charles Atlas on a moving image installation of Trisha Brown’s archival materials for “Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done,” at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2017 she founded The Portal, a curatorial platform dedicated to reimagining the archiving and contextualizing of performance practices and embodied histories in motion. She serves as visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Feb 07

[Conclusion and Findings] Readings

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This event will take place over Zoom at 7pm EST on Thursday, October 22.
Event Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83299492489
Zoom Event ID: 832 9949 2489

In conjunction with Catalina Ouyang’s exhibition it has always been the perfect instrument, writers K-Ming Chang, Lara Mimosa Montes, Thylias Moss, Arisa White, and Keith Wilson, will share their poetic translations contributed to Ouyang’s ongoing project [Conclusion and Findings].

For [Conclusion and Findings], Ouyang pollutes the email inboxes of hundreds of strangers and friends with a 2016 legal document that weaponized institutional language to exonerate an act of violence. The recipients are then invited to appropriate, handle, and “translate” the contents of that document back to Ouyang. While the exhibition presents Ouyang’s reordering of the nearly 40,000 words generated by the contributions to [Conclusion and Findings], this event allows for some of the original translations and transmissions of the document to hold space.

About the exhibition
https://knockdown.center/event/catalina-ouyang-it-has-always-been-the-perfect-instrument/ presents sculptures made over the last two years alongside a new two-channel video installation that comprises Ouyang’s reordering of the nearly 40,000 words generated by the contributions to [Conclusion and Findings]. The works in the exhibition, however, instead grow out of a space where language fails and in resisting any overarching material, disciplinary, or tonal vocabulary, it has always been the perfect instrument trades linguistic and taxonomic control for a landscape of rhythm, texture, touch, and communion.

About the contributors

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. More of her writing can be found online at kmingchang.com.

Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of THRESHOLES and a senior editor of Triple Canopy. She lives in Minnesota.

Thylias Moss, age 66, has published widely, a multiracial maker of things of language including poems, these days love poems. Recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Genius grant, two nominations for the National Book Critics Circle award, Professor Emerita of English and Professor Emerita of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She is in a meld with a wonderful man, Mr. Bob Holman, poems as well as life. She has one son, Ansted Moss, 29, a composer and pianist.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and an assistant professor of creative writing at Colby College. She is the author of You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up. Forthcoming in March 2021 from Augury Books is her poetic memoir Who’s Your Daddy. She serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press. arisawhite.com

Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. His book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry.

Jan 22

FiftyTwo Ft: Laurel Sparks

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Visitor Information
By appointment only October 2 – 23
Fridays noon – 4pm
Email alexis@knockdowncenter.com to schedule an appointment
We prioritize the safety of all visitors and staff. Please review the visitor guidelines before making an appointment.

Knockdown Center is pleased to present a new work titled Quad Relay by Laurel Sparks as a part of the FiftyTwo Ft. series of commissioned wall-based artworks in the East Corridor.

Sparks’ abstract compositions are determined by elaborate systems informed by Kabbalistic diagrams, string figures, and mathematical poetry which provide options for painterly scaffolding with an interdependence of modular parts. These magical calculations create esoteric systems of correspondences that allow the artist’s paintings to generate themselves, yet she also seeks out the places where these systems break down. Irregularities, digressions, and stains disrupt the stable elegance of interlocking shapes, producing striking tensions between order and chaos.

Quad Relay is the artist’s largest work to date, and its compositional logic is derived from the sestina, a complex form of mathematical poetry structured by six stanzas organized in numbered sequences. Sparks assigns points and directional lines specific colors, numbers, and elements according to the sestina’s structure, creating a self-generating algorithm that determines the painting’s geometric tableaux. An irregular grid underlies the composition, producing an almost kinetic, shimmering presence akin to dazzle camouflage, refusing fixed identity and yielding instead to perceptual flux.

About Laurel Sparks
Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work embodies geometric symbol systems and the transmitting potential of pattern and materiality. She holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston, MA. Her exhibitions include solo shows at Kate Werble, NYC and group shows at Cheim and Read NYC; LX, NYC; Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, NYC; Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; Berman Museum at Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA; Elizabeth Foundation Gallery, NYC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Art In General, NYC.

Sparks’ work has been reviewed in publications such as the New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, Blouin Artinfo, The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, Modern Painters, New American Paintings, the Drawing Center’s the Bottom Line, Art21 Magazine, Vogue Mexico, Boston Globe, Art in America, Bloomberg, Timeout New York, Huffington Post, and Art and Auction. She has received numerous grants and fellowships including MacDowell Colony, Elizabeth Foundation Studio Intensive Program at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, NY, Fire Island Artist Residency, NY, Residenza del Palmerino, Associazione Culturale Il Palmerino, IT, Berkshire Taconic Fellowship, SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship and an Elaine DeKooning Fellowship.

Painting assistance for Quad Relay by Maho Donowaki and Hannah Barrett.

Related Program [POSTPONED]
Sunday May 10, 6pm
Correspondence Table: Laurel Sparks and Shawn E. Hansen

Safety Guidelines for Visitors:

– If you are feeling unwell, exhibiting any symptoms of Covid-19, or have had contact with a COVID-19 patient in the last 14 days, please stay home and seek care.

– Visitors are required to wear face masks at all times while in the building.

– A maximum of four visitors will be allowed into the gallery at a time.

– Visitors are allowed in the galleries for 45 minutes of viewing time.

– Visitors are required to practice physical distancing in the gallery, keeping 6ft between you and other visitors.

– Knockdown Center will provide hand sanitizer for visitors at the entrance.

– We do not condone abusive, threatening, or unsafe behavior, and will remove any visitor who does not comply with safety requirements listed above, or is behaving in an otherwise unsafe manner.

Gallery protocol:

– Staff will wash hands thoroughly upon entering the gallery and wear face masks at all times.

– Staff will regularly disinfect touchable surfaces throughout the gallery.

– Staff will practice physical distancing at all times.

 

Jan 15

Dakota Gearhart: The Sextant of the Rose

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Visitor Information
By appointment only October 2 – 23
Fridays noon – 4pm
Email alexis@knockdowncenter.com to schedule an appointment
We prioritize the safety of all visitors and staff. Please review the visitor guidelines below before making an appointment.

 

Dakota Gearhart: The Sextant of the Rose investigates beauty as economic capital through the ubiquitous figure of the rose, speculating on whether the rose may have a hidden evolutionary agenda of its own. This exhibition, the artist’s first solo presentation in New York, features a new series of video-sculptures that incorporate psychedelic videos as well as living and dying roses to create an immersive world that viewers can become submerged within.

Informed by the artist’s day job as a florist, The Sextant of the Rose conjures an otherworldly setting where bouquets and videos reside. A suite of sculptures contain collage-like video animations of rose imagery that spins, flickers, and accumulates, sometimes integrating sculptural elements or the artist’s body modified by digital elements and effects. In a central video, Gearhart communicates with the rare and costly Juliet rose, who reveals her strategy of using sensuality to co-opt human desire as a way to navigate her own species’ evolution. Over hundreds of years, humans have cultivated roses to have more desirable patterns, better scents, more saturated colors, and even a more graceful death. By asking the rose what it experiences from its revered cultural position, Gearhart seeks to further understand how roses are using human desire to evolve and procreate themselves, and to what extent we are entranced in to performing their desires.

About Dakota Gearhart
Dakota Gearhart is a multidisciplinary artist who examines the environment and how it is perceived through technology and mythology. Her work has been exhibited at The Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, OR; Equity Gallery, New York, NY; On The Ground Floor, Los Angeles, CA; Horse Hospital, London, UK; Griessmuehle, Berlin, GR; Lab’Attoir, Thessaloniki, Greece; and Taiyuan University, Taiyuan, China. She has been awarded the Puffin Foundation Grant, Artist Trust GAP Grant, BRIC Digital Media Fellowship, and a National Endowments for the Arts Fellowship through a partnership with Residency Unlimited. Residencies completed include the Queens Museum Studio Program, NY; NARS Foundation, NY; Studios at MASS MoCa, MA; Wassiac Project, NY; Residency Unlimited, NY; and The Bronx Museum AIM Program, NY. Currently, she is a video educator with Pioneer Works and Educational Video Center, both in Brooklyn, NY.

Organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.

 

Safety Guidelines for Visitors:

– If you are feeling unwell, exhibiting any symptoms of Covid-19, or have had contact with a COVID-19 patient in the last 14 days, please stay home and seek care.

– Visitors are required to wear face masks at all times while in the building.

– A maximum of four visitors will be allowed into the gallery at a time.

– Visitors are allowed in the galleries for 45 minutes of viewing time.

– Visitors are required to practice physical distancing in the gallery, keeping 6ft between you and other visitors.

– Knockdown Center will provide hand sanitizer for visitors at the entrance.

– We do not condone abusive, threatening, or unsafe behavior, and will remove any visitor who does not comply with safety requirements listed above, or is behaving in an otherwise unsafe manner.

Gallery protocol:

– Staff will wash hands thoroughly upon entering the gallery and wear face masks at all times.

– Staff will regularly disinfect touchable surfaces throughout the gallery.

– Staff will practice physical distancing at all times.

Jan 15

Catalina Ouyang: it has always been the perfect instrument

By

Visitor Information
By appointment only October 2 – 23
Fridays noon – 4pm
Email alexis@knockdowncenter.com to schedule an appointment
We prioritize the safety of all visitors and staff. Please review the visitor guidelines before making an appointment.

Upcoming Event
Thursday October 22, 7pm
[Conclusion and Findings] Readings with K-Ming Chang, Lara Mimosa Montes, Thylias Moss, Arisa White, and Keith Wilson

Catalina Ouyang: it has always been the perfect instrument is a multimedia exhibition of large-scale interactive sculpture, salvaged objects, sound, moving image, and architectural intervention, as a continuation of the artist’s ongoing project [Conclusion and Findings] (2017–). In [Conclusion and Findings], Ouyang pollutes the email inboxes of hundreds of strangers and friends with a 2016 legal document that weaponized institutional language to exonerate an act of violence. The recipients are then invited to appropriate, handle, and “translate” the contents of that document back to Ouyang.

The exhibition presents sculptures made over the last two years alongside a new two-channel video installation that comprises Ouyang’s reordering of the nearly 40,000 words generated by the contributions to [Conclusion and Findings]. This exhaustive task reflects the artist’s initial struggle to make sense of polyphonic data and to comprehend a manuscript designed to create silence. The works in the exhibition, however, ultimately forego that endeavor toward consolidation and instead grow out of a space where language fails. In resisting any overarching material, disciplinary, or tonal vocabulary, it has always been the perfect instrument trades linguistic and taxonomic control for a landscape of rhythm, texture, touch, and communion.

About Catalina Ouyang
Catalina Ouyang’s practice spans sculpture, text, installation, performance, video, and participatory projects, among other modalities, exploring the interstices of myth, desire, subjugation, and monstrosity. Ouyang has had solo exhibitions at Rubber Factory (New York, NY), Selena’s Mountain fka Selena Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Make Room (Los Angeles, CA), and fort gondo compound for the arts (St. Louis, MO). Group exhibitions include Helena Anrather (New York, NY), fffriedrich (Frankfurt, Germany), like a little disaster (Polignano a Mare, Italy), Anonymous Gallery (Mexico City, Mexico), projects+gallery (St. Louis, Missouri), No Place (Columbus, Ohio), Field Projects (New York, NY), and Gallery 400 (Chicago, IL). Ouyang has attended residencies at Shandaken: Storm King (New Windsor, NY), the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), OBRAS (Evoramonte, Portugal), the Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL), and Palazzo Monti (Brescia, Italy), with a residency upcoming at the Vermont Studio Center. Ouyang holds an MFA from Yale University.

Funding for Catalina Ouyang: it has always been the perfect instrument made possible in part by the Puffin Foundation. This project was also supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant

Organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.

Exhibition Events
Held Remotely
Saturday, March 21, 2pm
slow jam: active restfulness is its own kind of money, a movement workshop with Lu Yim.

Safety Guidelines for Visitors:

– If you are feeling unwell, exhibiting any symptoms of Covid-19, or have had contact with a COVID-19 patient in the last 14 days, please stay home and seek care.

– Visitors are required to wear face masks at all times while in the building.

– A maximum of four visitors will be allowed into the gallery at a time.

– Visitors are allowed in the galleries for 45 minutes of viewing time.

– Visitors are required to practice physical distancing in the gallery, keeping 6ft between you and other visitors.

– Knockdown Center will provide hand sanitizer for visitors at the entrance.

– We do not condone abusive, threatening, or unsafe behavior, and will remove any visitor who does not comply with safety requirements listed above, or is behaving in an otherwise unsafe manner.

Gallery protocol:

– Staff will wash hands thoroughly upon entering the gallery and wear face masks at all times.

– Staff will regularly disinfect touchable surfaces throughout the gallery.

– Staff will practice physical distancing at all times.

Nov 06

Christina Ko, Catalina Ouyang, and Larissa Pham in Conversation

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Join us Saturday November 16 for a program in conjunction with the exhibition Jia Sung: Chaos, Whims, Lust with Christina Ko, Catalina Ouyang, and Larissa Pham. Each artist will present a piece of writing or body of artwork that expands on themes within Chaos, Whims, Lust, followed by a conversation with Sung.

Catalina Ouyang will read a lyric essay that takes up Journey to the West as a framing conceit. Christina Ko will discuss her body of artworks as they relate to themes in the exhibition such as a hero’s journey and the role of the female figure, subversive space, and the title Chaos, Whims, Lust. Larissa Pham will read from Fantasian, her 2016 novella dealing with themes of identity formation, Asian-American womanhood, and duplicity.

About the Exhibition
Chaos, Whims, Lust is an exhibition by artist Jia Sung that examines the role of the female trickster figure, replacing canonized patriarchal motifs in folklore with narratives of sisterhood, matriarchy, and rebellion. Comprised of over fifty figurative ink and gouache drawings accompanied by handwritten verse and prose poetry, the exhibition takes the form of a spatialized book that reads from right to left around the gallery space.

About the Presenters
Christina Ko is a Korean American artist living and working in Queens, NY. She received her BFA from Cornell University in 2013 and has since then shown her work in Los Angeles, CA, Washington D.C., and in around NYC. Selected exhibitions include: “Downloading Place”, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY (2019); “Fever Lure”, Selenas Mountain Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2019); “Crossover: East and West”, Korean Cultural Center, Washington D.C. (2018), and “Nightcall”, Public Address Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2017). Her work has also been featured in Gallery Gurls, the Arcade Project Zine, Hiss Magazine, The Fader magazine, The Washington Post, and Ballpit Magazine.

Catalina Ouyang is a visual artist and child of the Chinese diaspora by way of St. Louis, New Jersey, and a cul-de-sac outside of Chicago. Her non-disciplinary practice spans sculpture, text, installation, performance, video, and participatory projects, among other modalities, exploring the interstices of myth, desire, subjugation, and monstrosity. Ouyang has had solo exhibitions at Rubber Factory (New York, NY), Selena Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Make Room (Los Angeles, CA), Trestle Projects (Brooklyn, NY), the Millitzer Gallery (St. Louis, MO), and fort gondo compound for the arts (St. Louis, MO). Her work has been included in group exhibitions internationally, including at Helena Anrather (New York, NY), fffriedrich (Frankfurt, Germany), like a little disaster (Polignano a Mare, Italy), Anonymous Gallery (Mexico City, Mexico), projects+gallery (St. Louis, Missouri), No Place (Columbus, Ohio), and Gallery 400 (Chicago, IL). She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University.

Larissa Pham is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. She is the author of Fantasian (Badlands Unlimited 2016). Pham is the “Devil in the Details” columnist at the Paris Review Daily, and has published essays and criticism in POETRY, The Nation, Art in America, Guernica, Bookforum, Village Voice, and elsewhere. In 2017, Pham was an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She has taught with the Asian American Writers Workshop and Kundiman.

Oct 14

Facility Magazine Launch

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Join Facility magazine in celebrating the release of their inaugural issue — in the bathroom. Facility, the magazine that views society through the lens of the bathroom, is taking over one of Knockdown Center’s all-gender, wheelchair-accessible restrooms for a night of readings, installations, a special Facility-themed cocktail, and more.

Readings by:
Chloë Bass
Elizabeth Gumport
A.S. Hamrah
Heather Johnson & Svetlana Kitto
René Kladzyk
Jane Marchant
Erin Sheehy

Installations by:
Keenan Bennett
Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin

Facility treats the bathroom as a small but interesting window through which to view the world. Issue 1 includes: an interview with plumbers, bath riots on the El Paso-Juárez border, the origins of sex-segregated bathrooms, urine drinking, a history of fluorescent lighting, plus reviews of pills, ductwork, glycerin, and mirrors — and much more.

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