The Abrons Arts Center is proud to present Frame, an exhibition by New York-based artist Chelsea Knight in the Upper Main Gallery. Knight’s practice explores the political—in her view, a dimension of life of which the essence is dissent rather than concord. In her projects she examines social control in general and the ideologies of authority in particular. Informed by theatricality (among other aspects, stage design, improvisational acting techniques, and spoken word) and language as a cognitive and emotional apparatus, she creates narrative-based videos, photographs and participatory performances that focus on the current state of democracy—its principles, values, and aspirations. Topics that she has addressed include the US-Iraq wars, notably military interrogation techniques; the psychological aspect of facilities of confinement; the recent rise of the far right, especially in the US with the Tea Party phenomena; and feminist worldviews, in particular the condition of womanhood historically and today. Her subjects comprise professional dancers, military instructors, prison inmates, writers, herself and her own parents in a mix of the personal and the public and of the imaginary and the real.

Knight is premiering a piece in which a group of male construction workers assemble several wood pieces in order to create the basic skeleton of a house while speaking from feminist theory texts, as well as delivering their interpretation of the selected excerpts; this built structure remains in the gallery accommodating a plasma screen emitting a record of their action. Among the several passages that will be enacted are fragments of epoch-making feminist literature. For instance, from Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex: “No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.” Or, as another example, from Hélène Cixous’ 1975 The Laugh of the Medusa: “You can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes—any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another.” Knight analyses the connection between a traditional male form of labor, representations of the body as understood by feminism, and socially defined gender roles, bringing to light the structures of patriarchy that permeate contemporary society.

Chelsea Knight (b. 1976) lives and works in New York. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Whitney Independent Study Program. She was a recent participant at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace studio program and will be a Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellow at the Sam Fox Graduate School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis in 2011-2012. She has had solo shows at venues such as Momenta Art, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago; The University of Syracuse, Syracuse, NY; and the St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis (upcoming).

This exhibition is curated by Miguel Amado, 2010-11 AIRspace curator-in-residence at the Abrons Arts Center.