Savannah Knoop: Earthling
September 11th - October 9th, 2021-
Savannah Knoop, Earthling installation
Photography by Dario Lasagni
Essay by Lee Relvas
Somewhere on earth there is a cave so large that clouds form within it, and the monkeys who live there inhabit nests constructed from their own saliva. I’ve never seen pictures, but just the fact of its existence perfectly encapsulates the energy emanating from Savannah’s new body of work, a vibration I’d like to call extraterrestrial, if extra equals more, and terra equals earth, and earth equals life. More life!
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Savannah Knoop, Earthling installation
Under this influence I marvel my way through some thought-experiments: if these sculptures emitted a sound, it’d be a low static, intermittently soothing and ominous … if these sculptures had a smell, it’d be the smell of peat bogs where ancient and perfectly-preserved homosapiens lie…. Like that old queen Hamlet says, there are more things under heaven and earth, and hints of the philosophy dreamt up by these sculptures might be found in their colors, collected from all over the place.
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Savannah Knoop, Corner, Free Weaving the News (January/February 2020), 2021, Newspaper, Aqua-Resin, and pigment, 38 x 38 x 48.5 in.
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Savannah Knoop, Earthling installation
Like the seafood aisle of the supermarket: the enervated brownish-blues and pinks of frozen flesh, and the scuffed blacks, grays, and yellows of the trucks that delivered them there. There are the almost neon taupes found in night-vision footage of reclusive birds whose beaks look like Stone Age tools. Of the many different blackish-greens Savannah uses, I imagine they are sourced from the very oldest forest, moist and sunless and terrifying, with millions of insects seething among the roots, providing pale specks of sheen and gloss. And there’s a red that doesn’t even seem like a color at all but more like a supernatural spirit, a pair of red shoes that turns the wearer into a firebird.
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Savannah Knoop, Bow, 2019, Newspaper, Aqua-Resin, and pigment, 27 x 18.5 x 3 in.
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Savannah Knoop, Earthling installation
Speaking of form, a detour through materials-n-process is instructive: these sculptures are all made out of newspapers, and not just any newspapers but newspapers from 2020, the year that “doomscrolling” was selected as Word of the Year by both the Oxford English Dictionary and the entire country of New Zealand. These newspapers are cut into strips, rolled into thin scrolls, then woven into masses, swathes, tangles, and trails.
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Savannah Knoop, Notebook (June/July/August/September 2020), 2020, Newspaper, Aqua-Resin, and pigment, 92 x 56 x 5 in.
But perhaps a more accurate term to describe the method of creation is incubation, because the forms that emerge are unmanageable, inexplicable, unforecastable, and unforgettable in the same way that images in dreams are: overgrown chairs, buildings with holes in the wrong places, hair that is coffin-long, and corners that seem to be jealously gathering the walls toward themselves. By year’s end, these mysterious forms had already insinuated themselves deep inside our psyches long before Savannah showed them to us in the plain light of day.
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Savannah Knoop, Braid, 2021, Newspaper, Aqua-Resin, and pigment, 15 x 6 x 18 in.
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Savannah Knoop, Earthling installation
Sometimes Savannah posts little videos on Instagram: their strong blunt fingers rolling, rolling, rolling the news, little glimpses of the artist in their studio habitat. Which makes me think of the spider I saw this morning, swiftly rappelling down its self-made skein, busy as ever and to me, inexplicably so. But because I’ve been mind-melding with Savannah’s sculptures, I suddenly wonder what I might look like to the spider: gargantuan, and disconcertingly exoskeleton-less. “And what on earth is it doing with its antennae?” I imagine the spider thinking, hangry and exasperated as it watches me type. I zoom out further and see this:
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Savannah Knoop, Curve (April 2020), 2021, Newspaper, Aqua-Resin, and pigment, 90 x 16 x 5.5 in.
The artist in their studio is a human in a habitat. And durational performance artists of the sixties got nuthin’ on those monkeys in their saliva nests. Art is the evidence slash residue slash byproduct of life, that’s the important part. What results from these activities – a spider’s sculpture or a human’s web – can’t be exhaustively defined, interpreted, deployed, or consumed. But the force – curiosity – that animates both activities – making and looking – is inexhaustible. More life. That’s what these sculptures want to make sure I remember.
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Savannah Knoop, Earthling installation
Savannah Knoop is a NYC-based multi-disciplinary artist, and writer. They received their BA at CUNY under the mentorship of Vito Acconci, and their MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Sculpture+Extended Media. They have exhibited and performed at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the ICA Philadelphia, the Leslie Lohman Museum, David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami, and Nicelle Beauchene in New York. In 2001, Savannah Knoop founded the clothing line Tinc, which ran until 2009. From 2009-2016 Knoop co-hosted the monthly queer audio-visual party WOAHMONE. In 2007, they published their memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy (Seven Stories Press) and adapted it into a screenplay, co-producing the resulting feature-length film JT Leroy (Universal Pictures, 2019) directed by Justin Kelly, and starring Kristen Stewart as Knoop. Alongside Brontez Purnell, Knoop is working to adapt his novel, Since I Laid My Burden Down, into a feature film of the same title. Knoop has written essays for the LA Review of Books, 032C, Dazed, Critical Correspondence, and Cultured Magazine.