Autumn Knight
New York, NY
NOTHING: all at once
Exhibition Dates: October 3 - December 21, 2024
Gallery Hours: Thursdays & Fridays, 12:00 – 6:00 PM / Saturdays, 12:00 – 4:00 PM
By Appointment: December 12 – 14 & December 19 – 21. To arrange an appointment, please email Kristan Kennedy at kristan@pica.org.
The exhibition will be closed on Thursday, Nov. 7, through Saturday, Nov. 9, for the performance NOTHING#15: a bluff
Photo by Ali Gradischer
DESCRIPTION
NOTHING: all at once, a solo exhibition by Autumn Knight, is an ongoing dialogue with her performance series NOTHING#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff. From September through November 2024, Knight will present three performances at PICA that meditate on the Italian concept of dolce far niente, or “the sweetness of doing nothing.”
NOTHING#15: a bar transforms PICA’s warehouse into a host club, where performers provoke desire and exchange acts of care with audience members.
Performance Dates: September 19 - 21, 2024
NOTHING#15: a bed contracts the social structure: a two-person performance unfolds in a shared bed, exploring the possibility of rehearsing for the loss of a loved one.
Performance Dates: October 10 - 12, 2024
NOTHING#15: a bluff presents Knight alone, responding improvisationally to a sparsely-filled space, its features, and its audiences.
Performance Dates: November 7 - 9, 2024
As an accompaniment, NOTHING: all at once is an evolving installation that features the artist’s drawings alongside objects from each performance, as well as shifting sound and lighting elements. Here, the sleight of hand, the gimmick, and the prestige of disappearance create a score that foregrounds the release of logic and gestures of sense, allowing ideas to exist as they are in space and time. Knight invites audiences into a moment of respite from the creation of meaning as this experimental project crosses disciplines to consider the self in relation to intimacy, impermanence, and impossibilities.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Autumn Knight (b. Houston, TX) is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, sound, and text. Drawing from her training in theater, group dynamics, and psychology, Knight makes performances that reshape power structures and upend audience expectations of live experiences. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions, including Human Resources, Los Angeles; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Shedhalle, Zurich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Performance Space New York, NY; and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired to the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors, and fellowships, including an Art Matters Grant, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.