Brian Knep : About |
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Represented in the Boston area by the Judi Rotenberg Gallery and elsewhere by Ron Feldman Fine Arts. Brian Knep Ron Feldman Fine
Arts Judi Rotenberg Gallery |
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| Bio | C.V. Short | Selected Press |
| Statement | C.V. Long | |
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| Brian Knep combines art, architecture and science in work that has been shown widely throughout the United States, Europe and Korea. He uses custom software to create pieces that are dynamic and react to changes in their environment. Some are simply aware of the passage of time, changing, evolving and never repeating. Others are interactive, aware of the people around them—where they are walking or perhaps where they are looking—and react in response. Some of the pieces are small and intimate but most are large in scale, projected onto walls and floors. They feel organic and alive. Much of Knep’s work borrows from emergent processes in biology and mathematics. By simulating these processes on a computer, he explores the boundaries between complexity and simplicity, infinite and finite, organic and inorganic. Knep has worked in the art and science fields for over twenty years. His career has included the film industry, where he was a member of two teams receiving Academy Awards, one for Technical Achievement and a Scientific and Engineering Award. He then moved to the exhibit design industry, and now to full-time art practice. In 2005 he became the first artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School as part of a residency co-sponsored by the Office for the Arts at Harvard, and in 2006 received grants from the Creative Capital and LEF Foundations. His large-scale interactive exhibit Deep Wounds, 2006, recently won an AICA/New England award for Best Time Based Work. Knep has had solo shows at the New Britain Museum of American Art, CT, the MIT Museum, MA and Arizona State University, and group shows at the University of Hartford, CT and the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, among others. Knep lectures extensively about his work, has been published in ACM Computer Graphics and other scientific journals. He graduated with honors from Brown University, where he studied computer-science and mathematics. Knep lives and works in Boston. |
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I strive to create work that pulls people out of their daily experience into a new way of feeling, understanding, or seeing the world. Some of my pieces are small and intimate while others are very large in scale, but all explore personal and cultural aspects of change, healing and memory. My pieces are dynamic and react to changes in their environment. Some are merely aware of the passage of time, changing, evolving and never repeating. Some are aware of the people around them—where they are walking, or perhaps where they are looking—and react in response. Through these I’ve been exploring the idea that every interaction causes changes in us and that our current state is the result of all the interactions we’ve had as yet. Likewise, many of my pieces are permanently changed by interactions with their environments and the people in them. These interactive pieces share much with the performing arts. The software, or program, I write is the choreography, and in executing this program the computer becomes a dancer sharing the floor with visitors. Sometimes the piece leads, but the viewer transforms the dance by stepping into, or onto, the work. Underlying these explorations is a search for what I call the soul in technology. Our most recent and beloved tools, such as the internet and cell phone, disengage us from our environment, the people around us, and even our own bodies. In reaction, I want to use technology to allow us to have more meaningful and soulful connections with each other and our environment. This has led me to create pieces that, although highly technical, feel
organic and perhaps alive. Much of the work borrows from emergent processes
in biology and mathematics. I use these to pull complexity out of simplicity,
the infinite out of the finite, the organic out of the inorganic, and
explore the boundaries in between. |
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