Brian Knep : About |
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For inquiries, please contact Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 212-226-3232. If in the Boston or surrounding areas, please contact the Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Boston, 617-437-1518. Brian Knep |
| Brian Knep is a new-media artist who uses science and technology to explore change, healing, struggle, and acceptance. Often his works are dynamic and respond to changes in their environment. Some are simply aware of the passage of time while others are interactive, sensing and reacting to the people around them. Knep has had solo shows at the New Britain Museum of American Art, the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and Arizona State University and has been part of group shows at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Laval Virtual in France, MobileArt in Sweden, and the Insa Art Center in Korea, among others. His works have won awards from Ars Electronica, Americans for the Arts, AICA/New England and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2005 Knep became the first artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School in a program co-sponsored by Harvard's Office for the Arts. Knep lives and works in Boston and is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY and Judi Rotenberg Gallery, 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 and seeing the world. Using the tools of our time I explore universal themes—in particular the interconnected and impermanent nature of the world—and in the process address the role of science and technology in our lives. Before focusing on art I spent fifteen years studying technology, learning its potentials and limitations. Flexible and powerful, digital tools have an enormous pull, promising productivity and happiness. Yet they have a way of leaving us cold and removing us, rather than connecting us, from our environment and ourselves. Likewise, we seek salvation in science, hoping to ease our fears. Afraid of pain, we research disease; afraid of death we research aging. Yet regardless of the progress we make, pain is inevitable and life is impermanent. Behind all my work is a desire to explore and address these conflicting themes by using cutting-edge science and high-technology to make works about connection and change. I write software that is logical, coherent, cold and rational to create organic, life-like, never repeating pieces that react, and thus connect, to their environments. Similarly, applying tools and techniques that scientists use to understand and control the world, I create pieces about change and acceptance. I love these juxtapositions, using a tool to create something outside of its normal application to discuss values and assumptions. To create work that feels organic, I often borrow from emergent processes in biology and mathematics. Emergence describes a complex system that arises out of lots of relatively simple interactions, like the way flocking arises out of the individual behaviors of many birds. I use these systems to pull complexity out of simplicity, the infinite out of the finite, the organic out of the inorganic, and explore the boundaries between. Many of the resulting pieces, for instance, never repeat, exploring ideas of impermanence. Science is rich in metaphors. Birth, death, suicide, communication, coordination, separation and combination—all are present at the cellular level. Science is a rich way of bringing people into a deeper discussion about our place in the world. In my interactive work I use the body as an interface, the pieces observing and reacting to how and where people walk or look. These natural interfaces help us connect to the work, the surrounding space and ultimately ourselves. In my larger installations, I work with group interactions, bringing people, even strangers, into face-to-face contact with each other. These interactive pieces share much with the performing arts. The software 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 onto, or into, the work. One of my long-term goals is to pull my work out of the white box and create large, site-specific installations for parks, city squares, airports and other public areas. Places where workers, going for a cup of coffee, stumble upon the piece and are pulled out of their daily lives; where strangers can connect with the work and each other; where a lone individual can meditate about the changing nature of the world. I plan to continue exploring universal themes and addressing our relationship with science and technology, and I hope the public sphere will give the resulting pieces more impact. |
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