Craft, scrap, and architectural minimalism coincide in Formal Complaint. Featuring work by Aria Dean, Female Background, Christopher Hanrahan, Mario Navarro, and Megan Pahmier, the exhibition returns handiwork to formalism, maintaining a sense of slackness. Metal armatures lean and bend precariously; a painting on unstretched canvas drags on the floor. Discarded materials and everyday objects come to conjure an upright but ‘bereft formalism’ (as Hanrahan calls it). Tenderness and despair coalesce in objects that can only just support themselves, much less make a claim for historical or philosophical significance. The works in the exhibition undermine past minimalisms from multiple directions—in terms of material, attitude, and dependence on context—but out of a care for and maintenance of form, rather than a casting off of it. Through these mergers of vernacular minimalism and sad design, work and supporting structure, Formal Complaint creates its own ecology of exhibitionary space.

Exhibition Events

April 15, 6-9pm
Opening Reception
May 25, 7pm
Artist talk

Aria Dean is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles, CA. She currently holds the position of Assistant Curator of Net Art & Digital Culture at Rhizome. Her writing has been featured in Artforum, The New Inquiry, Real Life Magazine, Topical Cream Magazine, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. She also co-directs Los Angeles gallery and project space As It Stands LA. Currently, Dean’s research, writing, and visual work explore the relationship and resonances between blackness, media, and communication and information technologies. She works primarily through text and sculpture to hypothesize an apocalyptic blackness.

Female Background consists of Gabriella D’Italia and Cameron Crawford. Their collaborative work has been exhibited at TEMP, New York; Doyers, New York; and Perimeter Gallery, Belfast. Publications include Mary Magazine, Bell School Press; Touch, See, Taste vol. 1 (anthology), Temporary Agency; and Maine Arts Journal Quarterly, UMVA. Readings include Interstate Projects, New York.

Christopher Hanrahan was born in 1978 in Mudgee, Australia, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Hanrahan was the recipient of a 2015 Australia Council Greene Street Residency, a 2013 New Work Grant, and a 2013 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. He has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas, notably at MONA, Hobart; PICA, Perth; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Recent exhibitions include Vitreous Humour at Kansas Gallery, New York, and Sequester, Embassy of Australia Gallery, Washington, DC.

Mario Navarro (b. 1984) is a Mexican-American artist based in New York. The formal aesthetics and syntax to which Navarro returns stand as alternative references to certain classes of objects, just as words do not refer to things themselves. In Navarro’s practice, objects and architectures operate as nodes of meaning and conceptual signification within a broader system of relations. His work belongs to collections such as The Petitgas Collection (London), Frances R. Dittmer Collection (Chicago), Sayago & Pardon (Los Angeles), ArtNexus (Bogotá), Dieresis Collection (Guadalajara), and Fundación Colección Jumex (Mexico City).

Megan Pahmier lives and works in New York. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and completed her Master of Fine Arts at Hunter College. Her work has been featured in the New York exhibitions Drawing for Sculpture at TSA Gallery and Future Fossils at Dutton Gallery as well as Hand, Finger, Digit at The Old Hairdressers in Glasgow, Scotland, among others. Most recently, she exhibited her work at Essex Flowers in New York in the two-person show Dust Stutter.

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Dana Kopel is a curator and writer based in New York, where she works at the New Museum. Recent exhibitions include If you want to do something, forget this debt, and remember it later, Celaya Brothers Gallery, Mexico City; Givens, AA|LA, Los Angeles; Abstract Sex*, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and Care (curated with Marian Tubbs), Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY. She was an assistant curator for the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Art in America, frieze, X-TRA, Modern Painters, and elsewhere.

Rachael Rakes is an independent critic, curator, and teacher based in New York. She is currently the Programmer at Large for the Film Society of Lincoln Center; an editor at the Brooklyn Rail; and Editor at Large for Verso Books. Rakes has written criticism in numerous outlets, most recently for Art-Agenda, Artforum, the Village Voice, and Ocula. With Leo Goldsmith, she is at work on a book on the collaborative practices and media critique of radical filmmaker Peter Watkins, which received a 2014 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

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Knockdown Center’s exhibitions are selected through a competitive open call for proposals. Through a multi-round process, exhibition proposals are reviewed by Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board and selected based on quality, distinctiveness, and response to Knockdown Center’s unique site and context within an ecosystem of live events.

Founded in 2015, the Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board is currently comprised of seven sitting arts professionals with diverse but overlapping interests and fields of expertise. The Curatorial Advisory Board meets bi-annually to provide critical feedback on a wide range of proposals as well as contributing to discussions about larger programmatic goals. To learn more about proposing an exhibition or short-term project please visit our Proposals Page.

Knockdown Center is pleased to present TRAVELER, a mural by Carl E. Hazlewood, as a part of our FiftyTwo Ft series of long-term commissions of wall-based artworks in Knockdown Center’s East Corridor.

The mural’s title, TRAVELER, references the way viewers must physically move in order to grasp such a large work in a circumscribed space: essentially a long corridor at Knockdown’s entrance. The title also alludes to the artist’s shifting position, described by Hazelwood as not only that of an immigrant but also as black, poor, older – a boundary-crosser of sorts within a category of persons increasingly problematized (and sometimes demonized) in recent political machinations. While not explicitly a sociopolitical artist, Hazelwood manipulates abstract form and space in an effort to illuminate his personal vision, offering the possibility of poetic revelation.

Carl E. Hazlewood, born in Guyana, South America, has been an exhibiting artist since childhood. He is also a writer and curator currently living in Brooklyn, NY. He is co-founder of Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ, and taught at New Jersey City University and other institutions. Currently associate editor for Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, (Duke University), he’s written for many other periodicals including Flash Art International, ART PAPERS Magazine, and NY Arts Magazine. Since 1984 he has organized numerous curatorial projects for Aljira such as ’Modern Life’ (co-curated with Okwui Enwezor). Hazlewood’s project on behalf of Aljira, ‘Current Identities, Recent Painting in the United States,’ was the US prize-winning representation at the ‘Bienal International de Pintura,’ Cuenca, Ecuador 1994. As an Independent curator he has organized numerous exhibitions including those for The Nathan Cummings Foundation, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Hallwalls, NY; Artists Space, NY; P.S.122, NY,. Hazlewood has written catalogues for The Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois; The Ben Shahn Center, William Paterson University, NJ; The New Jersey State Museum. Trenton NJ, and many others. His writing has also appeared in periodicals including ‘Flash Art International’, Rome; ‘ART PAPERS Magazine’, Atlanta, and ‘NY Arts Magazine’. Latest book essays include the upcoming, ‘Terry Adkins: RECITAL, for the Tang Museum and Gallery, Skidmore University, Saratoga, NY.

NADA New York
March 2-5, 2017
Skylight Clarkson North
572 Washington Street
New York, NY 10014
Booth #1.18

Knockdown Center is pleased to announce its participation in NADA Projects at NADA New York 2017. For its inaugural presentation at NADA New York, Knockdown Center has commissioned an installation by LAZY MOM, a collaboration between Josie Keefe and Phyllis Ma. LAZY MOM continues their exploration of the potential of food photography and installation with the creation of a living wallpaper, covering the walls of the project booth with Americana foodstuffs – slices of bread, American cheese, roses, limes, corn, and hotdogs. Throughout the duration of the fair, the edible wall covering will evolve, ripen, wilt and rot, acting both as a dynamic decorative element and memento mori.

UNSEEN HAND is a group exhibition that brings together fifteen artists who employ various mediums and processes to question technology and expand upon its conventional definition. The artists exhibited assert their practice as an encounter with a technological event, whether by disrupting the technical order, poetizing methods of industrial production, or inciting sensuality by means of devices typically associated with disconnection. By presenting these instances, the exhibition warns us of the danger in comprehending technology merely through scientific merits.

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Knockdown Center’s exhibitions are selected through a competitive open call for proposals. Through a multi-round process, exhibition proposals are reviewed by Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board and selected based on quality, distinctiveness, and response to Knockdown Center’s unique site and context within an ecosystem of live events.

Founded in 2015, the Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board is currently comprised of seven sitting arts professionals with diverse but overlapping interests and fields of expertise. The Curatorial Advisory Board meets bi-annually to provide critical feedback on a wide range of proposals as well as contributing to discussions about larger programmatic goals. To learn more about proposing an exhibition or short-term project please visit our Proposals Page.

Knockdown Center is pleased to present You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously., an exhibition that features David Court, Erin Diebboll, David Horvitz, Anouk Kruithof, Amanda Turner Pohan, and Steven Zultanski.

You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously.

Given that the average person, in a lifetime, sheds about 4,167.921 cubic inches of tears, and that I’m somewhere around 1/3 of the way through my life, then we can assume that, so far, I’ve shed about 1,373.034 cubic inches of tears.

Since water makes up 60% of a human body, and the volume of the average body is 5,064.97 cubic inches, then we know that the volume of water in an average human is 3,038.982 cubic inches.

And so, so far, in my lifetime, I’ve shed about 45.181% of my body’s water in tears.

Since tears are mostly water.

Let me see here.

— Steven Zultanski, Agony (2012)

Taking up the processes of formal alchemy that lie at the core of the book-length poem Agony by Steven Zultanski, You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously. is an exhibition that traffics in transformative acts.

The show brings together the work of five artists whose techniques resonate with Agony’s provocative alchemical idiom: these artworks quantify bodily and affective features, apply logical and scientific reasoning to absurd ends, and manipulate the linkages between language and things. By placing the objects in calculated proximity to one another—and in relation to the connective tissue of Zultanski’s text—the exhibition format effects its own dynamic shift, conjuring poem-as-exhibition.

You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously. invites viewers to inspect examples of morphed materiality within and between the elements on view, and thereby creates opportunities to consider the potential (and celebrate the futility) of giving stable form to ephemeral traits or experiences.

Exhibition Events

January 13th, 6 – 9pm: Opening reception.
February 10th, 7–9pm: Poetry Reading with Alejandro Crawford, Mónica de la Torre, Shiv Kotecha, and Stacy Szymaszek, featuring a sound installation by Fernando Diaz.

Artist Bios

David Court is an artist and writer based in New York. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include 8eleven (Toronto), Museo de la Ciudad Querétaro (Mexico), Proxy (Providence), and Skol Center des Arts Actuels (Montreal). Court has been Artist-in-Residence at the Banff Center, in the Workspace program of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Art’s SHIFT program, and Brown University’s Interrupt:3 conference.Court works with selection, formatting and narration as modes of expression in relation to exhibition as a genre of cultural production.

Erin Diebboll was raised in Massachusetts and has been based in Brooklyn and the San Francisco Bay Area. Last summer she participated in Container Residency 01, traveling on board a container ship across the Pacific Ocean. She has been granted residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Kala Art Institute, Tsarino Bulgaria, the Vermont Studio Center, LMCC’s Swing Space on Governors Island and the Lower East Side Printshop. She received her BFA from Cooper Union.

David Horvitz has recently had solo exhibitions at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; the New Museum, New York; Jan Mot, Brussels; Dawid Radziszewski Gallery, Warsaw; Chert, Berlin; Yvonn Lambert Bookshop, Paris; Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. He has realized projects with Recess, Clocktower Gallery, post at MoMA, Printed Matter, Rhizome, and Triple Canopy. He received the Rema Hort Mann Grant in 2011 and founded Porcino gallery in Berlin in 2013.

Anouk Kruithof is a Dutch artist, working between Mexico City, New York City, and The Netherlands. She has exhibited internationally at institutions such as MoMA, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; and Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. Her work is in the collections of Fotomuseum Winterthur, Aperture Foundation, FOAM, and the Stedelijk Museum. Anouk Kruithof is one of the five nominees of the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunstprijs 2016. Kruithof runs the publishing platform stresspress.biz and is co-creator, director and jury member of the Anamorphosis Prize.

Amanda Turner Pohan received her BFA from The School of Visual Arts and her MFA from Hunter College. As an extension of her art practice, Pohan is a co-founder of Temporary Agency, an artist-run nomadic platform for exhibitions and publications, as well as The Bakery Social Club, a monthly gathering for artists and designers.

Steven Zultanski is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Bribery (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014) and Agony (BookThug, 2012).

Alison Burstein is the Program Director at Recess. Burstein previously worked as a member of the education departments at MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum and organized a wide array of public programs, performances, experimental classes, and artist projects across these institutions. As an independent curator, she has staged exhibitions at NURTUREart (Brooklyn, NY) and the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles, CA). Burstein is a master’s student in Art History at Columbia University.

Installation photography by Emily Kloppenburg

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Knockdown Center’s exhibitions are selected through a competitive open call for proposals. Through a multi-round process, exhibition proposals are reviewed by Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board and selected based on quality, distinctiveness, and response to Knockdown Center’s unique site and context within an ecosystem of live events.

Founded in 2015, the Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board is currently comprised of seven sitting arts professionals with diverse but overlapping interests and fields of expertise. The Curatorial Advisory Board meets bi-annually to provide critical feedback on a wide range of proposals as well as contributing to discussions about larger programmatic goals. To learn more about proposing an exhibition or short-term project please visit our Proposals Page.