Outline: Summer will take place Knockdown Center’s backyard space, “The Ruins,” across the last weekend of August, Saturday the 28th and Sunday the 29th, 2021, featuring headline performances by NYC post-punk icons ESG, and Canadian dance-pop favorite Jessy Lanza, and specially selected daily lineups for a cross-genre party that pays honor to club music’s past, present, and future.
Joining the legendary Bronx pioneers ESG on Saturday’s lineup will be an exciting group of young performers that span pop, hip-hop, and R&B, including: rising L.A. synth-pop duo Magdalena Bay; Minneapolis-based songwriter, rapper, and poet, Dua Saleh; Philadelphia’s beat innovator Body Meat; and wildly prolific rapper Pink Siifu, performing with DJ Ted Kamal and special guest appearances from members of associated crew GKFAM.
Sunday’s lineup surrounds Jessy Lanza with an eclectic collection of artists from different corners of dance music. It will include: NYC house and hip-hop producer Galcher Lustwerk, performing a “100% Galcher” set of original material; mysterious left field pop artist Doss; Miami bass-music duo Basside, whose SOPHIE-produced, Fuck It Up EP, was released earlier in 2021; Cibo Matto founder and prolific solo artist, Miho Hatori; and L.A. synth-punk newcomers Provoker, whose debut record for influential Swedish label YEAR001 is expected later this year.
Two-day passes and single-day tickets for the Saturday and Sunday shows are on sale now.
Resuming a regular schedule from this Summer relaunch, Outline will return inside the Knockdown Center hall for Outline: Fall in November of 2021, and then continue with Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall events throughout 2022.
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.
Chief Keef, the godfather of Chicago drill and one of the most influential rappers of the past decade, Live In Concert, at Knockdown Center for a super rare and legendary experience
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Support by Venus X, Slayter, Trap Manny, Kevo Muney & Hu Dat.
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.
Due to rising concerns amid the COVID-19 virus, the Disease Thrower performance has been postponed. 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 the website for updates on the rescheduling of Maravilla’s performance. The wellbeing of our guests and staff is our top priority as we continuously monitor the situation.
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Knockdown Center is pleased to present Disease Thrower, a newly commissioned performance by Guadalupe Maravilla, presented in partnership with The Chocolate Factory Theater. Maravilla’s practice, which spans sculpture, drawing, and performance, draws heavily on autobiography to address the larger context of the immigrant experience within increasingly repressive and abusive systems. Disease Thrower lives between an immersive mini-opera and an invented healing ritual, and addresses the artist’s experience as an unaccompanied child immigrant escaping El Salvador to the United States, the subsequent intestinal cancer he endured, and his healing methods. For this performance, new mythologies will be created as the artist transforms Knockdown Center into a space for storytelling, choreographed rituals, and healing.
Under the embrace of a purple cloud, Knockdown Center’s expansive Main Space will be populated by totemic objects, a suite of gongs, a revving motorcycle, and a cast of otherworldly characters. The performance will incorporate one of Maravilla’s signature Disease Thrower shrine sculptures that operate simultaneously as an artwork, an instrument, and, for the first time as part of this performance, as a headdress worn by the artist. A mix of returning and new characters conceived by Maravilla — from metaphysical snail border crossers and an operatic singer named La Momia to a troupe of masked, mourning quinceañerxs — will fill the Main Space. Disease Thrower is accompanied by a live score by the Mexico City-based electro-drama band La Rubia te Besa, composed in collaboration with Maravilla. Following the performance, the audience will have an opportunity to commune and dance to a concert-style show by La Rubia te Besa.
Disease Thrower is the third and final work of a performance trilogy based on Maravilla’s autobiography. The first chapter, titled The OG of Undocumented Children, performed at the Whitney Museum, NY, in 2018, relayed the story of how Maravilla became an undocumented and unaccompanied child immigrant. The second chapter, Walk on Water, performed at the Queens Museum, NY, in 2019, focused on Maravilla’s past as an undocumented immigrant, the deportations his family endured, and his methods for healing.
The personal experience Maravilla details in Disease Thrower echoes that of many immigrants, and highlights the lingering and internalized effects of this kind of journey and lived reality, calling attention to the body as a site where systemic abuse manifests. Sonic elements will envelop the audience within a resonant environment of collective ritual intended to help cleanse the body of phobias and create a space for healing. Knockdown Center will vibrate with the sounds of gongs and motorcycle engines, reverberations intended to shake free the audience members’ bodies of their own invisible, deep-seated traumas.
Disease Thrower marks the inaugural commission in the Knockdown Center Propeller series, which supports artists in the production of ambitious new works made specifically for Knockdown Center’s unique spatial context.
About Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla was part of the first wave of undocumented children to come to the US from Central America. The artist immigrated from El Salvador alone at age eight to escape the Salvadorian Civil War, and became a US citizen at twenty-seven. In 2016, as a gesture of solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as a last name in his fake identity, Maravilla changed his birth name Irvin Morazan to Guadalupe Maravilla.
Maravilla creates fictionalized performances, videos, sculptures and drawings that incorporate his pre-colonial Central American ancestry, personal mythology, and autobiography. Through a multidisciplinary studio practice, Maravilla traces the history of his own displacement, interrogates the parallels between pre-Columbian cultures and our border politics.
Maravilla has performed and presented work extensively in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, MARTE (El Salvador), Central America Biennial X (Costa Rica), XI Nicaragua Biennial, Performa 11 & 13, Fuse-Box Festival, Exit Art, Smack Mellon, Rubin Foundation, the Drawing Center and the ICA/VCU in Richmond, Virginia. Maravilla has upcoming projects at the 2020 Guatemala Biennial, Site Santa Fe, Phoenix Art Museum, and São Paulo Museum of Art (Brazil). Maravilla has been awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship 2019, Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space 2019, Map fund 2019, Creative Capital Grant 2016, Franklin Furnace 2018, Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant 2016, among many others. Maravilla has been featured in the NY Times, Brooklyn Rail, the Guardian, Art Forum and many other publications. Maravilla’s work has been collected privately and by the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Deutsche Bank, MoMA, and Whitney Museum of American Art.
About La Rubia te Besa
La Rubia te Besa is a multifaceted music project proclaimed as ‘electrodrama’, where keyboards, guitar, bass, percussion and digital sound processors propose a pastiche of prominent references to instrumental pop culture (soundtracks, hymns, popular melodies, ringtones, etc.). The band, formed in 2013 (Mexico City) by members of different creative profiles (not formally trained musicians), bases its name on an imaginary aphorism that comes from an inescapable unconscious voice, an eternal submission to the canonical seduction.
About Knockdown Center Propeller Series
Guadalupe Maravilla: Disease Thrower is the inaugural commission of the Knockdown Center Propeller series, a commissioning program designed to support artists in the production and presentation of ambitious new works in Knockdown Center’s expansive Main Space. Responding to Knockdown Center’s unique architectural context and programmatic mission, the series is designed to support new site-specific work by artists who have not yet had the opportunity to extend their practice by significantly scaling up. The program furthers Knockdown Center’s mission to present innovative new projects by artists making ambitious, risk-taking, and boundary-crossing work.
About The Chocolate Factory Theater
Since its first season in 2005, The Chocolate Factory Theater has supported the development and presentation of new work by a community of local, national and international artists working in dance, theater, and interdisciplinary performance. The Chocolate Factory’s programs have drawn many thousands of new visitors to its 5,000 square foot industrial facility in Long Island City, Queens. The organization recently purchased a permanent facility in the neighborhood.
Disease Thrower is commissioned by Knockdown Center and presented in partnership with The Chocolate Factory Theater. Commissioning support also provided by The MAP Fund. Support also provided by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by Jerome Foundation, The SHS Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
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.
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.
RSVP here!
Resident Advisor tickets: http://bit.ly/AmelieLensRA
Tickets on sale now!
◾️ AMELIE LENS ◾️ The Belgian DJ and producer has been DJing since she was 18 years old and since has become one of the most celebrated artists in the world of electronic music. Lens tours worldwide but still has time to run her popular party series, Exhale, and her own record label, Lenske. She’s known for her full throttle sets where she unloads her techno skills and sheer love for the genre on her crowd of fans.
◾️ FARRAGO ◾️ Farrago creates arpeggiated melodies that reverberate endlessly to the point where they are deemed tangible and are driven by the resonating sound of a classic 4/4 kickdrum, it’s the perfect marriage between body and soul.
◾️ RACHEL NOON ◾️ Noon who began crafting her sound in the 90s, credits New York’s underground queer dance scene for her accelerated growth over the last few years. As the founder of the queer, trans and non-binary focused platform Large Marge, she has become a pillar in the scene where her roots lie. Noon is also a resident of Unter. Her sets focus on creativity and structure while pushing the boundaries of sound.