NinaJohnson

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 in the Front Gallery, 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 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 columns of legible type and image into knots of concentrated noise, embodiments, and improvisations rendering the possibility of a different kind of experience of current events.

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 complicated representation of an imagined world where hip hop, history, and the stars collide in one object.

About Savannah Knoop

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.

About Kahlil Robert Irving

Kahlil Robert Irving is an artist born in San Diego, California, in 1992, currently living and working in the USA. He attended the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University, in St. Louis (MFA Fellow, 2017) and the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA, Art History and Ceramics, 2015). In February 2024 Irving opened Archeology of the Present at the Kemper Art Museum in Saint Louis. Concurrently, AnticKS & MOdels + My theater to your eyes at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. Irving recently participated in I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. He has also participated in the Singapore Biennale, Singapore; Soft Water Hard Stone; The New Museum Triennial; and Making Knowing at the Whitney Museum of Art. Works by Irving have been included in group exhibitions at the Abrons Art Center, New York; The Anderson Collection at Stanford University, San Francisco; and Mass MOCA, North Adams. He was an Artist in Residence at Art Omi in summer 2018. Also, he was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2019 and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2020. Irving’s work is in the collections of the Ken Ferguson Teaching Collection at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri; J.P Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, New York; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; the Riga Porcelain Museum, Latvia; the Foundation for Contemporary Ceramic Art, Kecskemet, Hungary; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He has presented solo exhibitions at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, Connecticut (2018), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021) and the Walker Art Center (2023).