Negative Space featured five artists whose works reference the domestic environment. Through various media, the artworks in this exhibition explored the temporal and spatial intervals between humans and the objects that most closely surround them; as the viewer encountered references to the emotional and psychological space of home, they were placed in stark contrast to the Knockdown Center’s vast industrial space. The artworks situated the viewer in a contemplative space, at once personal and claustrophobic. The comfort and security of home was juxtaposed with raw open space. This exhibition explored how works depicting the domestic can simultaneously convey an emotion of feeling exposed and vulnerable.

Jeremy Coleman Smith carefully built a 12 x 12 x 8 foot room in which interior paneling was made from hand-cut cardboard and exterior siding was formed out of soaked and embossed Stonehenge paper. Rachel Higgins exhibited two works, both read as domestic objects gone awry. Her sculptural work is often performative and participatory, bringing an unexpectedness to familiar objects. Cait Carouge’s large-scale photographs are unsettling and explore the uncanny in domestic interiors. Lauren Gregory turns the process of painting into an animation and creates a narrative that locates the viewer at home on the couch, comforted by face-painted pillows. Kevin Frances also uses a narrative form in his three Japanese woodblock prints, telling a story of a young woman moving into a new apartment.

In conjunction with the exhibition was a dinner event by Eric May, Chef and Founder of the Piranha Club, an artist-run underground supper club that was launched out of the Roots and Culture Contemporary Art Center in Chicago. Eric teamed up with artist Paul Anthony Smith in a long-anticipated culinary throw down to present an intimate dinner on Saturday, March 28.

Curated by Stacie Johnson and Gabrielle Garland

image: Kevin Frances, “Lucas’s Clothes (3),” 28x14x6 in, Ceramic, pigments, acrylic varnish. 2014.

In partnership with Clocktower Productions, a new generation of New York-based artists utilized installation work as a platform for performance, and partnered regularly with alternative event spaces and collectives in Brooklyn and beyond. Featuring the work of Hisham Bharooccha, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Raul de Nieves, Christian Joy, Desi Santiago, and Ben Wolf, Knockdown began its exploration of this very intersection. Through its ambitious program and expansive architecture, this exhibition brought a dynamic selection of artists onto its grounds for a month of on-site project development, culminating in a celebration of the work and its fluid transformation from environment to stage.

Curated by Joshua Bienko and Leeza Meksin, Tightened, As If By Pliers included works by Julio Cortàzar, Kevin Andrew Curran, Luc Fuller, Angelina Gualdoni, EJ Hauser, David Humphrey, Mary Reid Kelley, Amy Lincoln, Chris Martin, Susan Metrican, Hooper Turner, Alan Ruiz, Harriet Salmon, Michael Velliquette and Sheilah Wilson.

In 1968, Argentine novelist Julio Cortàzar traveled to India to photograph an 18th century observatory built by Maharajah Jai Singh II, in Jaipur. He took nearly 300 photographs of the structure which later became the source for, and a contingent part of From the Observatory, an epic poem-narrative consistent with his genre-less writing style. Cortàzar’s photographs and subsequent writing considers the observatory in relation to the “art space.” For Cortàzar, the observatory in Jaipur was a place of deep consideration of the cosmos, but also of the dance eels do for an absent audience, of the eroticism of Jai Singh, of the depth of humor and the surface of philosophy.

For Cortàzar’s artistic output there were no categories: taking photos, writing poems, drinking mates, writing a nonlinear novel in 1963: these were all natural outgrowths of an intellectual curiosity. He was not being a “Photographer,” then a “Writer,” then a “Poet.” He was Socratically committed to questioning.

Through this insistence on questioning, the artists in Tightened, As If by Pliers practiced resistance to the mundane anchoring of the present using art as a window through which the past and the future is accessed from the vantage point of the present.

Tightened, As If by Pliers was presented by Ortega y Gasset Projects.