John Knight
@ The Art Institute of Chicago
111 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603
Opening Thursday, March 11th, from 6PM - 7:30PM
Since the late 1960s, John Knight has utilized existing forms of distribution and communication—including magazine subscriptions, museum mailing lists, travel posters, recipes, and floor plans—to reconsider the social structures and value systems that support the exchange of ideas and commodities. By sublimating expected graphic identities, Knight’s work, as the artist explained, “puts into question how the design affect mediates ones understanding of subjects/objects, within their institutional registers.” For example, in Museotypes, 1983 (created for an exhibition at the Renaissance Society and on view at the end of February at the Art Institute in gallery 294) 60 bone-china plates commemorate international museums, not by their logo or façade, but as architectural floor plans. While his projects are always specific to each context, the discursiveness of their subjects speaks to fundamental socio-economic issues.
« previous event
next event »