MILL ZOMBIE / PROM KING, OIL ON CANVAS, 22" x 28", 2008TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23RD, 2008: Spinello Gallery (2294 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami Florida - 33127) is proud to present, "So Long Scarecrow," an exhibition of paintings by Kris Knight. This will be Knight's first exhibition with the gallery.
Kris Knight's latest series of paintings pays homage to the lost friends of the artists hometown; the guardians of tradition who never migrated, but rather stayed behind to sow their fortunes and reap their shortcomings amidst the hopeless redundancy of routine.
Boys and girls who became adults so early by following in their parent's footsteps as half of their classmates took flight are Knight's scarecrows-- his secretive and burned-out youths who thanklessly sustain withering communities; preventing them from becoming ghost towns by staying exactly where they are.
But life isn't always tedious for Knight's scarecrows. The smart ones find magic in the fields and forests that border their homes and in the fleeting moments that precede dawns early light, their ageless effigies, like porcelain nymphs, are caught in glimpses between the trees. Within these paintings are mixed stories of strength, exhaustion and isolation but not with out the magic that is harvest time.
Kris Knight is a Toronto-based painter whose work examines performance in relation to the construction, portrayal and boundaries of sexual and asexual identities. Concentrating on thematic, figurative works that are often as attractive as they are disturbing, his paintings allude to various expressions of duality, often dealing with opposing notions of hiding and confronting, ambiguity and androgyny, innocence and the erotic.
Through the creation of imaginary and biographical character-based narratives, Knight attempts to strike a balance between the dichotomies of pretty and menace and myth and reality. Depicting intimate, but nonetheless foreboding nocturnal, rural landscapes as a background for his narratives, Knight's often tense portraits are sugared with elements of Canadiana representative of his upbringing.
Exhibition through November 1st.
www.spinellogallery.com
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