In artist Kelly Knight’s basement studio in Providence, R.I., her “studio buddy” Claude, a snow-white domestic dove, coos insistently. He’s calling for a mate, says Knight. Domestic doves are family birds, she says, “all about mating, nesting, having babies.” Knight, who owns Claude’s parents and who says Claude was an “oops baby,” is hoping to find a new home for the bird with a female dove. For now, Claude remains a little lost.
Claude’s story — his uneasy solitude, his desire for meaningful company — is relevant, says Knight, to her new show: “You Are Not Lost.” The show goes up at the Farm Projects gallery in Wellfleet from July 7 to 17.
“This show is about many things,” says Knight. “For me, it’s about finding place and connection in a physical, literal sense but also in a philosophical and spiritual sense.”
The pieces that make up “You Are Not Lost” range from small framed works to much larger architectural sculptures. Knight’s drawings and collages bring her constructions to life. She has painted a cityscape onto a cardboard box, unfolded. Her drawing style is both elegant and scrawlish: delicate, gentle, entirely focused, but infused with ease. Spindly ladders decorate many of her pieces.
“It’s about connection,” she says. “Sometimes when I’m making those marks, they morph from ladders to railroad tracks. Sometimes in my head they’re roads.”
Knight’s work is often abstract: a cluster of mysterious brown spirals in All Our Bones, All Our Cells, and, in Follow the Lightning, a starkly outlined mound against a cloudy-blue watercolor background.
“I don’t have realism skills for drawing,” says Knight. But she does draw wobbly houses, vaguely representational shapes (boats? airplanes?), girls’ legs and feet stepping nimbly to and fro. And she draws penned ladders and lines. Those things imply a story: someone has been here, someone will be here.
“This is something that comes up a lot,” says Knight, pointing at one of her pieces, Beginning Of The Journey: a line wraps around a girl’s thinly-outlined ankle and stretches toward a nearby building. Connection, discreet in its obviousness. “I have other pieces where the connecting line is bridging a gap between two people,” she says.
As compositions, Knight’s pieces feel alive with movement: the tiny ladders look as if they might blow in the wind, stray feet and legs have paused mid-step, and the dainty leaning houses hint at lively, unseen communities.
In a corner of her studio, Knight has constructed “a crazy jumbled treehouse,” titled To Say We Were Here. It’s tall and looks slightly unstable: cardboard rooms jut from the central vertical branch, twisted twig-ladders adjoining. The rooms are decorated with photographs Knight has taken. And like in some of Knight’s other pieces pinned onto the wall, in the treehouse, darting in and out of the rooms, there are tiny paper cutouts of young women and girls.
The cutouts are AI-generated images, says Knight. She writes instructions for the AI that sometimes resemble poems: short snippets like “Three birds keep time” and “Under words, expanding sky,” and sometimes longer verses, like “The memory of midnight in a Nantucket harbor, I jumped out of the boat and floated in a field of stars, life felt like a mystical adventure.”
Then the AI creates an image, often one that includes a person. If she is satisfied, Knight inserts the person into an awaiting landscape. The characters are nearly always girls, says Knight. One small figure, the profile of a young girl, wears a white cloak with the hood up. Her face is obscured; she’s a ghostly silhouette.
“ ‘Emily Dickinson longs to be a spirit photo,’ ” says Knight. Those are the words she gave to the AI. “That’s what she is.”
In 2021, Knight presented her first show at Farm Projects: “Enter Unknowing.” “A lot of the work that was in ‘Enter Unknowing’ came from this recurring dream I’ve had for years about a little ghost girl,” she says. “She would terrorize me. She never did anything, but her presence was so ominous.” Knight could see the girl only from the waist down: 18th-century skirt and tights, old-fashioned little shoes.
Finally, one night, Knight had had enough. “The girl was hidden behind a curtain,” she says. “I could see her feet sticking out from underneath. She slid one foot out, close to me, like she was going to touch me with her toe. And I lost my shit.” Knight screamed at the girl in the dream: “Enough! No more!” The dream ended, and Knight decided she needed to reclaim the ghost girl’s image. In “Enter Unknowing,” Knight began that reclamation with the girl’s stockinged feet and legs — the same graceful fragments that adorn the pieces in “You Are Not Lost.” In “You Are Not Lost,” the additional AI-generated girls are “fully realized people.”
“It’s become empowering,” says Knight. An intrapsychic spiritual connection, visualized.
Hidden things inspire Knight. “The unseen and the unknown are just so compelling,” she says. “I think, especially now, when everything is so accessible, when you can pick up your phone and Google anything. It feels, though it’s not true, like there’s so little mystery left in the world. And I think the mystery of life is the best part about it.”
Certainly, Knight’s spirit girls and curving ladders are mysterious. Also mysterious is the handwritten text scattered throughout nearly all of Knight’s pieces. Words and sentences float in the air like smoke, or are crushed into corners, compressed tangles of energy.
“I’m specific about where I put it,” says Knight, “in terms of the larger composition.” The words are meaningful to her, “But I don’t want it to be obvious,” she says. “I’ve been struggling for years to try to figure out how I can use text in my work in a way that feels right for me. And the right way for me feels like making it a little more elusive.”
She’ll start writing in a linear way, and when the text starts to feel too legible, she’ll turn the page upside down and write that way. “In some ways, it’s like I’m trying to maintain some privacy,” she says, and recognizes the contradiction. “I’m putting private words out there, but I’m also shielding it a little.”
There’s another reason for concealing obvious textual meaning, says Knight. “I feel like people looking at the work need to find their own meaning in it and not just have me clearly illustrate it. It comforts us to know and understand. But it’s not really comforting to have all the answers in the end.”
Right now, Knight is caring for a family member with dementia who is slowly becoming lost. Knight, too, in caretaking, feels she’s becoming lost “on multiple levels.”
“You Are Not Lost” is a personal mantra, she says, as well as an address to the audience. In her studio, under the observant eye of Claude the dove, Knight makes art to embrace the connective possibilities of “not knowing.”
You Are Not Lost
The event: Works by Kelly Knight
The time: July 7 to 17, with an opening reception Saturday, July 8, 6 to 8 p.m.
The place: Farm Projects, 355 Main St., Wellfleet
The cost: Free
