Zimoun [KE]³

Knockdown Center, in partnership with bitforms gallery, presented a new site specific installation by Swiss artist, Zimoun.

Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects. In an obsessive display of simple and functional materials, these works articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life.

For Knockdown Center, Zimoun presented an immersive environment of 250 motorized wood beams and ropes. Each unit cyclically strikes the floor, producing a sonic experience reverberating within a 10,000 square foot atrium – Zimoun’s largest site-specific project in the US to date.

In conjunction with this monumental work Zimoun also presented new projects at bitforms (opening Sunday, February 8) and Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University (opening Thursday, February 5). Click here for the official press release.

The exhibitions are generously supported by swissnex boston, Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, KulturStadtBern, and Swisslos – Amt für Kultur Kanton Bern.

On June 21, Knockdown Center presented a full­ spectrum look at the automobile as our nation’s long standing symbol of manifest destiny and superfluous ingenuity. Set amidst three acres of parking lot, gallery, blackbox, and warehouse, M­aspeth’s World of Wheels took this undeniable American obsession to its illogical conclusion featuring an impressive array of high­ end custom and collectible cars in conversation with automobile­ inspired visual art. Complementing the landscape were the sights, sounds and smells typically associated with a state fair including: fried things, metal/psych rock bands, burnt rubber, sledge hammers hitting steel, charcoal grills, pirate radio and more!

An exhibition curated by the collectively run gallery, Regina Rex.

Taking on the notion that living quarters, work places, or exhibition venues such as the Knockdown Center could have their own agency and voice, James Cordas, Leeza Meksin and Jeff Williams worked with the building to generate works specifically for this occasion. Jeff Williams’ undulating wall piece made from expanded metal flocked with nylon fibers spaned a fifty foot wall, slipping from manmade material into the realm of natural phenomenon—a process that could be seen to mirror the building’s own arc over time. Leeza Meksin stretched sheer fabrics across an isolated section of the architecture, interrogating the structure by highlighting its mutability and permeability. James Cordas used the wind power from an industrial strength fan found on site to generate work that accepts the unpredictable character of the light, sound and body of the cavernous space. Together, the works featured in House, What is Your Crime? spoke to the possibility for placing authorship and active willpower in the hands of the building itself while in dialogue with its artists and inhabitants.

¹The title is borrowed from a line in the poem “House & Bernadette” by Bernadette Mayer from the book Scarlet Tanager. In this poem, the poet holds a conversation with her apartment. The poem begins with the question: “B: House are you anyone who could be doing anything at this moment? Are you a boy watching train tracks in the past standing in a big yellow field?”