John Knecht
Biography
John Knecht has been a practicing film and video artist since 1973. His films, videos and multiple channel installations have been shown widely. Knecht’s video “The Possible Fog of Heaven, 1993, was featured in an article by Cory Archangel in the May, 2023 issue of Artforum, His most recent animation, “Curiosities From the Anthropocene”, 2020 was slelected for the 2021 Athens International Film and Video Festival and the 2021 RPM Festival. It was screened in March 2022 in San Francisco at the Other Cinema. His 2010 animation “Deluge” was included in the 2021 “Straight Through the Wall” series in New York, which projected videos on various buildings around Manhattan and Brooklyn. Most recent solo exhibitions: John Knecht and Russel Scott Day at Alexander Heath Contemporary, Roanoke, Virginia, March 2024; “after math”, Alexander/Heath Contemporary, Website, 2017; “Animating Destiny: Electric Paintings and Other Works”, at the Esther Massry Gallery of the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. 2016; other recent exhibitions include “Considering the Probability of Divine Intervention”, a five channel video installation at the Llewellyn Gallery at Alfred State College; “Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel”, a fifteen channel installation at the Everson Museum, Syracuse; four animation panels from that series were purchased by the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, in Utica, NY, for its permanent collection. 205 Hudson Street Gallery, NYC, “A History of the Experimental Television Center”; Westbeth Gallery, NYC “Triacontagon: 30 Years of the Artists Fellowship Program at NYFA; The “Urban Video Project”, an undertaking of, Syracuse University, Light Works Gallery and the Everson Museum; One Person Screening at Union Docs. “First Person Cinema” series, University of Colorado, Boulder; “Making Movies”, Schweinfurth Art Museum; The @ LAB, Ohio Univeristy; The Tou Scene Contemporary Art Center in Stavanger, Norway, the Vienna Film Festival, Bard College, the Mix Festival, NYC; Cine Probe, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
John Knecht holds the Russell Colgate Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History and Film and Media Studies Chair, Emeritus at Colgate University. Knecht lives and Works in Hubbardsville, New York
Statement
I am a sign painter. Now the signs have lost their meaning. I have always been interested in the dialectic of ‘horror’ and ‘’humor’, ‘Ha – ha!’/’Oh No!’. The synthesis of that will continue develop over the remaining years of our lives, and beyond. In these whirlwind, late days of a presidential election, the outcome of which threatens to crack the ‘unum’, scatter the “pluribus” and make the “e” into a “screeeeem” weighs on me as I draw and edit this onslaught.
There is a whirling dervish of plastic shrapnel and electro magnetic shards of information swirling through us like a category 4 hurricane set on “Repeat”.
We live in a constant, non-stop rush of things. The swirl of humanity is living in a complete electronic space. Jean Baudrillard told us, forty years ago that we are becoming one with the media. Time is determined by the furrow of the media day. Identity is determined by the piling up and arranging of the visual data points, be they particles of grain, pixels or shouts. We are dancing and wrestling to the nonstop beat of late simulacra. But as another ghost from the past told us: ‘Nothing is real.’.
Testing the Waters
Video-still, 2024
(Excerpts from College of St. Rose Press Release , January 2016)
Knecht has been active in making experimental and avant-garde film and video since the 1970s. His films, animated videos and multiple channel installations, paintings and drawings are informed by his rural Midwestern, evangelical upbringing in the 1950s. They reveal a fascination with unknown, imagined spaces that exist outside of our rational, physical world. Most of his better known work is animated, including The Possible Fog of Heaven and The Poxiox Series. The artist explains, “Welcome to my world. You enter at your own responsibility. I am providing the material for provocation. I am not providing the answers.”
Knecht’s films, videos and multiple channel installations have been shown all over the world. Recent exhibitions include: Considering the Probability of Divine Intervention, a five-channel installation at the Llewellyn Gallery, Alfred State College, Alfred, New York; Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel, a 15-channel installation at the Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York, now installed (in part) in the permanent collection of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York; The Urban Video Project, sponsored by Syracuse University, Light Works Gallery and the Everson Museum; Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel, Clifford Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York; First Person Cinema series, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado; Making Movies, Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center, Auburn, New York; The @ LAB, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio; Tou Scene Contemporary Art Center, Stavanger, Norway; Vienna Film Festival, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Mix Festival, New York City.
Knecht’s works are held in the collections of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, The Queens Museum, California Institute of the Arts and more. Awards include New Forms, Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts; Jerome Foundation; New York Foundation for the Arts, Artists Fellowship.
Recently retired, Knecht holds the Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of Art & Art History and Film & Media Studies, Emeritus at Colgate University. He held the chair in media studies at Colgate, where he taught since 1981. In addition, he served as chair of the Art and Art History Department from 1991 to 1999.
The artist also taught in the Semiotics Department at Brown University in 1980 as a visiting lecturer. He served as assistant professor in the School of Art at the University of Oklahoma from 1974 to 1978. From 1980 to 1982, he served as a member of the executive committee at the Collective for Living Cinema in New York. Knecht was a member of the board of governors of the National Conference on Undergraduate Research from 1993 to 1999.
Knecht holds a master of fine arts degree from Idaho State University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He served in Vietnam with the U.S. Army’s Ninth Infantry Division from 1967 to 1968.
Knecht lives and works in Hubbardsville, New York. For more about the artist, visit www.johnknechtart.com.