A dinner event presented in conjunction with the exhibition Negative Space. Chef Eric May, founder of the Piranha Club, an artist-run underground supper club launched out of the Roots and Culture Contemporary Art Center in Chicago, teamed up with artist Paul Anthony Smith in a long-anticipated culinary throw down to present an intimate dinner on Saturday March 28.
Free, family friendly Winter Jamboree complete with bounce house, giant obstacle course, a beach themed photo booth, craft corner, a music video workshop and much more!
Join in the fun on February 20th from 11am-2pm.
Presented by Red Bull Music Academy, Drone Activity In Progress, sixteen solo of today’s most daring sound artists and duos performed on three stages filling the massive space of the Knockdown Center with the thundering noise, drone and experimental techno.
On November 16th, 2012, Knockdown Center hosted an “Malingering Uvula II: The Face That Lied (Geometric Edibles).” The event was billed as “equal parts performance, immersive installation, and dinner party.” Created by artists Camilla Ha and Michael Merck, the ongoing series “sparked by a conversation about the Futurist Cookbook and surrealist dinners.” Ha, Fagan Noose, MV Carbon, Cupola Bobber, Keti Kartveli, Brian Chase, Gabrielle Muller, David Lackner, Aaron Fagan, Zebediah Keneally, and Thermos Unigarde all contributed to the various environments.
Knockdown Center officially opened its doors to the public on August 10, 2012. To celebrate, Knockdown Center commissioned original works from nineteen artists, designers and architects to create The Outdoor Recreational Sculpture Part (OIRSG). Inspired by both the whimsy of the sport and the formal possibilities of the course’s architecture, these artists created a miniature golf course on the sprawling three acre grounds of the Knockdown Center.
Mini-golf Holes by
Arielle Baio, Astrid Busch, Jeff DeGolier, Aasha Foster, Eric Hagan, Kemeya Harper, Jamie Lin, Rowan Norlander-McCarty, Geetha Pedapati, Anna Pinkas, Zach Postone, Naida Serak, Chris Shelley, Amber Shields, sumu (Gabriela Bruno, Soña Power, Ioannis Sochorakis & Alex Postelnicu), and Brian Wondergem
Musical performances by
Trabajo, Happy New Year, Saturn Dogs, and Tim Garrigan
On Saturday, October 6th 2012, Knockdown Center presented Bring Your Own Beamer featuring live projections by almost 30 artists accompanied by live music.
Projections by: Sam Ashford, Ivana Basic, Beauty Today, Lily Benson, Dora Budor+Maya Cule, Victoria Campbell, Micaela Carolan, April Childers, Tomashi Jackson, Deborah Johnson, Anna Liberman, Rebecca Leopold, Amanda Long, Hannah Manfredi, Andrew Ross, Wadih Sader, Saki Sato, Joao Salema + Sofy Yuditskaya ,Taylor Shields, Anthony Simon, Nikita Vishnevskiy +more! Live Music by: Lydsod, Trabajo, Raft, Jeanann Dara, Skip LaPlante, and Insect Deli
In December of 2013, Knockdown Center presented Non-denominational Holiday Sculpture Farm.
The original press release…
Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Hanukkah, Festivus, Kwanzaa, Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve… the list goes on and on but what does it all mean? Although each insular observance claims agency over its calendar dates and rituals there are many similarities and narrative cross-over points adding to the general cacophony of geographic, financial, and emotional obligations. Non-denominational Holiday Sculptures seek to toy with this insularity by sussing out the universal traits of celebratory ritual and incorporating them into our everyday lives. Non-denominational Sculptures are access points to these universal traits and are meant to remain on view throughout the calendar year to encourage sustained tolerance and appreciation for this unanimous human desire to assemble and celebrate our various cultures.
In a collaboration with Clocktower Productions, pioneer scupltors Joel Shapiro and Richard Nonas transformed the Knockdown Center’s main space and gallery with a non-traditional sculptural installation.
Presented by Live Nation and Honda Stage, progressive house music DJ Deadmau5 played a free concert for fans in celebration of his upcoming double album, 5 Years of Mau5.
Deadmau5 gave his fans a taste of his newest tracks mixed in with some old favorites in an exciting performance that was streamed live on YouTube.
In partnership with Knockdown Center, Sorry Archive presented And the Villagers Never Liked You Anyway, an archaeological excavation of a 10’x10’ bed of dirt overseen by Dr. Ulf Hueber. The space was gridded into 10 plots, each with its own curator. The plots acted as experimental test pits for heterogeneous creative practices.
Exhibitions are historical sites: they reveal with varying degrees of transparency the events and personalities that produced them. A wide range of curatorial perspectives are situated here within the same set of physical constraints. The objects that emerge are not emblems. They are substances articulated over time and forced into tight quarters, and their materiality cannot be ignored.
Sorry Archive’s scientific approach to this exhibition aimed to reorient viewers in their relationship to art objects. Viewers became excavators, grounded in the real, negotiating strata of cause and effect. Yet they were faced with an array of microcosmic histories and impossible mythologies. There could be no endpoint of knowledge gathered from this paradoxical dig, where factual time was altogether disturbed. New works fell into seeming ruin. Gaps in knowledge pocked all surfaces with expanses of the unknowable. This site was populated with artifacts of the future, a reverse archaeology of the present.
