Installation with soundtrack
Montreal, 2008
An installation in an urban basement imagined as a prototype for a holding environment cum living/working space to be built at the bottom of a disused mine shaft in Northern Canada.
The Holding Environment soundtrack
This page presents a narrative of the very earliest concerted actions by Knowles Eddy Knowles.
As we wrote in the catalogue for the traveling show Dabao / Takeout (2013):
The story begins in China.
You formed in the organic mess of School. Such a beginning contains both ambiguous and unambiguous aspects: the former, because you don’t know where it will go, the latter, because you are all in the same place, responding to the same pheromones and stimuli. It is different from being of the same place; you have already left home and are in the process of defining yourself in the heady environment of transaction and transformation. You wonder: what are the limits of School?
Soon after, you literally broke apart out of touch and smell’s reach into the contemporary virtual condition, some allegiances intact and a new acquired laptop. Not to give the impression that locations don’t matter, but they don’t filter down to a common denominator. Except for your own language, to some degree; language, that state between realized and unavailable, forthcoming and withheld, utterance and parole. The formation of a common language, in its infancy, bases itself on abstract situations, where the formal schooled elements carry past their coherency into a communication model and enclave resembling something like a general intellect stir-fried in a medium-sized wok.
Action Figures Action (2004)
this proto-Knowles Eddy Knowles work started with the purchase of action figures from global chain Toys Я Us in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Placing these toys under our clothing, we then commando scrambled around the snow-glutted moats encircling the Citadel, an old military installation in the centre of Halifax, working up a good sweat. Finally, we returned the action figures to Toys Я Us.
Models for Monuments (2004)
The models, made from detritus from art school trash bins, involved no grandiose titles or dedications. They functioned as monuments to the notion of monumentality itself rather than any particular individual or institution.
Subsequently, Knowles Eddy Knowles crept clandestinely into the vacant presentations room of a local architecture school (at the time it was called TUNS) and inserted some of our own makeshift models among those of the students.
Egg Dock (2004)
an action carried out in Kitakyushu Japan to try and coordinate simultaneous docks made from a naturally standardized material available in both locations Knowles Eddy Knowles occupied at the time.
Informal Architectures Residency Studio at the Banff Centre (2004)
Egg dock research in Banff.
Sphere Write Here at the Other Gallery, Banff Centre (2004)
Questions from the Archives, presented as part of the exhibition One Brief Moment at Apexart, NY (2005).
With each exhibition they realize, Apexart publishes a brochure with interviews or text written or chosen by the curators. Knowles Eddy Knowles collected all of the questions from all brochures and asked them again, with their contexts removed, without any answers. The questions played randomly and at variable intervals.
Excerpt:
Lil’ Babylon (2007)
Lil’ Babylon was conducted within the frame of artist Yvette Poorter’s residency project “Dwelling for Intervals” (Knock on Woods). Knowles Eddy Knowles spent a week inside of Poorter’s portable shed within Tent – Centre for Fine Arts in Rotterdam, NL. We used the opportunity staying together to develop models for mutual living and working.
Exhibited at Husslehof in Frankfurt, DE, and realized in cooperation with Leonhardi Kulturprojekte (2016).
This second iteration of Inhale Exile was subtitled “My other father chugged beer from ashtrays.” It included works and documents by: Michael Fernandes, David Hammons, Gareth James, Leisure (Susannah Wesley, Meredith Carruthers), Lee Lozano, Sean Lynch, Steffanie Ling, Anthony McCall, Daniel Olson, Nick Santos Pedro, Alessandro Rolandi, Lawrence Weiner, Norman Rockwell.
See the web PDF of the second Inhale Exile broadsheet.
Photographs and documentation of actions and installation, video
Developed as a commission for the McKinsey & Co. offices in Frankfurt (2006), published in Informal Architectures: space and contemporary culture (Black Dog Publishers, 2008)
Dieter Rams, designer whose domestic furnishings and appliances made the Braun company famous, lives on a mountain on the edge of Frankfurt, in a house he designed which functions like a living museum to his own products. Taking his living/working environment as a kind of role model for collective production, we developed models for co-habitation in the studio as well as in-situ, staking out his house from the woods across the street. Eventually we made it inside to interview him.
Exhibited at L’escalier, Montreal, CA, from May 21 to July 16, 2016.
This first iteration of the curatorial project Inhale Exile, subtitled “the break,” consists of two parts: an installation in the space of L’escalier, and a screenings of video works punctuating the run of the exhibition. The smoke break and the discourses and speech acts (rumours, counter-histories) produced there are understood as aesthetic potentialities of smoking culture. In institutional contexts, these breaks have engendered reconfigurations of time and space, the sharing of informal comments or opinions, private thoughts in public.
“The break” included works by: Sean Lynch, Leisure (Susannah Wesley, Meredith Carruthers), Michael Fernandes, Gareth James, Roger Quallen, Alessandro Rolandi, Lawrence Weiner*, Philip Guston*, Richard Prince*, Lee Lozano*, Claire Fontaine*, Hans Haacke*, David Hammons* and screenings of videos by Nina Koennemann, Lee Kit, Erik Blinderman, Steve Carr, Knowles Eddy Knowles, Daniel Olson and Christian Boltanski.
See the web PDF of the first Inhale Exile broadsheet.
Mixed media installation, dimensions variable.
Shown as part of the exhibition Making It Work, at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, CA (2009)
Individual components titled:
Curtain. Digital print on polyester, wood rod. 56″ x 96″. 2009
Pentaspheres (a pattern for a toy ball found on www.mothering.com, modified for the provision of cushioned seating). Fabric, reground polystyrene. dimensions variable. 2009
Beacons (an approximation of a household lamp – as evidence of an object stealthily produced on company time with company materials – as described in the chapter “Retirement homers” in the book Moral Gray Zones by French Professor of business management Michel Anteby). Paper, tracing paper, metail fixture, bulb, electrical. dimensions variable. 2009
Wok (a bistro table fashioned from an old door previously used in the installation titled “Holding Environment”, spring 2008, 48 rue Mozart, Montreal). Wood, 3’x3′ diameter. 2009
Tablecloth (Presence and Absence in Crowds written in 2008 by Michael Eddy, desecrated in 2009 by Robert Knowles and Jon Knowles). Paper, 11″x17″. 2009
