Running Stitches

Photography by Jacob Holler/Clare Gatto.

Nina Johnson is pleased to present Running Stitches, a joint exhibition of sculptural works by Savannah Knoop and Kahlil Robert Irving. Opening April 4th, 2024, this exhibition places the artists’ channels of art work in conversation with each other to elicit a new kind of relationship to space and time—exploring materiality, sensory detail, labor, and a reconsideration of seemingly factual information and familiar forms.

Born in San Diego, California, and living and working in Saint Louis, Missouri, Kahlil Robert Irving is known for his assemblages of lay- ered image and sculpture, challenging ideas of identity and culture in the Western World. In Running Stitches, he presents works from his “Street Views” series: interrogating the ground as a metaphorical space consisting of signs and symbols, and presenting the possibil- ity of an alternative landscape. Born in San Francisco, and living and working in New York City, Savannah Knoop is an artist and writer. At Nina Johnson, Knoop presents works from their “Free Weaving The News” series, employing traditional and invented weaving techniques to wrestle with a year of daily newspapers. The process contorts col- umns of legible type and image into knots of concentrated noise, em- bodiments, and improvisations rendering the possibility of a different kind of experience of current events.

In dialogue, Irving and Knoop span material and media differences to transform and distort ostensibly legible images and ideas. Irving’s ceramic tiles, hovering on the ground plane, reinterpret both asphalt sidewalks and the night sky, while Knoop’s free-weavings aggregate data on the wall. Each artist’s body of work creates a sense that the sculptures are reaching for each other, interacting within a liminal space full of strange potential. The labor of craft is made visible in the sculptures’ physical forms: Irving’s works allude to industrialization and public space, and Knoop’s works parallels the social medium of news and the craft of weaving, turning inside-out its gendered and domestic associations. These recognizable forms of labor are de-familiarized and complicated with complex sensorial detail, inviting the viewer to take a closer look.

Of note in the exhibition is Dreams in the line and Memories (Whipped) (Irving, 2023), a large work comprising of 78 mostly unglazed tiles large glazed and unglazed ceramic on a wooden platform, which material form emphasizes the interests of the artist, while also displaying a complicat- ed representation of an imagined world where hip hop, history, and the stars collide in one object. In communication, Mirror Flag (Knoop, 2023), a spare and vast woven rectangle depicts an abstracted shredded US flag as though reflected in a mirror. Stretcher Railing (Knoop, 2023) uses a steel armature framing system to allow the work to be viewed upside-down, rotated 90 degrees, or flipped front to back, a “view- er’s-choice” choreography that is both thrifty and full of potential, asking the viewer to activate the “facts” from different vantage point; a thought experiment that mimics the culture of information in the digital age. The piece’s title references the British memorial of fence railings converted into stretchers during World War II, and then placed back into their origi- nal function as fences.

“The show speaks to a kind of making,” said Savannah Knoop. “An augmented materialism that takes the information that is literally under our feet or right in front of our faces and transforms it both visually and structurally so that within these familiar forms new ideas and questions appear.”

Running Stitches is on view through May 18th, 2024.