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Mount Q, Carla Knopp |
Bodies of Art.
Over the course of several years in the late 2000s and 2010s, the artwork of Carla Knopp will continue to change and evolve, and reform altogether. Looking at the paintings she created and displayed at her most important local shows from about a decade between 2008 and 2016, we cannot help but see cohesive and distinct periods – bodies of work.
Each show, a body of her oeuvre, laid bare like the naked protagonist in her early painting 6 AM Drug Test from 1990 (see in Part Two). Each new exhibition, a journal of picaresque experiences and intuitive thought experiments jotted down with paint.
Her shows are particularly effective in their cohesive visual storytelling. Just as an exotic vacation locale cannot be expressed by a single selfie snapshot, Knopp's aesthetic vision is best viewed not in individual pieces, but by immersion among a group. She seems conscious of this as she prepares her bodies of art during these years.
Looking at a picture in any of the shows, and then stepping back for the grander vista of a group, Knopp's paintings can be seen as a document of a temporal journey. A once-upon-a-time journey of struggles and achievements that reveal a balance between two great artistic rationales for painting itself; the traditional motive of creating a picture, and the more modern approach to moving paint around.
And there are more fundamental dichotomies at play in her painted tales; action versus analysis, spontaneity vicarious to reflection, inferno vis-a-vis paradiso.
Knopp creates in that elbow, that wedge between obvious sides; each visionary idea a coiled fulcrum ready to spring from competing currents and battling impulses. In-between places and tug-of-wars don't seem to bother her a bit.
It is a journey that will lead toward a magnum opus of a new direction – her eventual immersion into the universe of electronic art. But the painting shows of the new century come first and herald the way.
Magic Mountains and Torrents of Magma.
With the unveiling of each successive exhibition, we peek into Knopp's uniquely personal artistic eras that define themselves and reveal their self-contained visuality.
Her painted ideas are often conceptually dense, but painted with a light and and spontaneous touch, surprising and refreshing – interestingly idiosyncratic – as has become a signature attribute of the artist by this time.
Each show of pictures, a sumptuous feast of harmonious courses – each with a seemingly shared, or at least related, topography and flora. Sometimes there is a hint of fauna. And when there are the imprints of a civilization present, they are symbiotic to the scene in ways that do not mar, but merge with the landscapes she creates. If buildings appear, they are like Frank Lloyd Wrights that meld into the surrounding environment with their modesty of color and silhouette. And then there are the strange, being-made structures, are often organic, curving and biomorphic, with an effect of unsettling beauty.
In October 2008, Knopp's show Mounts was exhibited at 4 Star Gallery on Massachusetts Avenue.
The exhibition includes two larger landscape format works and a series of smaller square paintings. The larger works were reviewed by Dan Grossman writing in NUVO Newsweekly on November 9, 2009, as follows,
“The title Love Hovel, Barkshed Recreational Area may seem to indicate a real place name but the ethereal setting of this painting doesn't quite seem to resemble the title in any literal sense...
Knopp said she found the title for this piece after its composition, during a Google search that – like the composition process itself – was an intuitive one.”
Of the smaller Mounts series in the show and the other larger work, Grossman writes,
“All of the paintings in this show, including the oil on panel Mounts series, were painted intuitively. Correspondingly, they are less focused on representing any particular thing and more about the creative process itself. All, that is, except for Morning on Earth. By virtue of its stunning depiction of a blue shoreline and looping arches under a lightening sky, this painting captures the ephemeral beauty of the world we live in.”
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Morning on Earth, Carla Knopp, from the exhibit Mounts |
As mentioned earlier in this series, the Morning on Earth theme would be a recurring motif for the artist over the course of her ongoing career, beginning in the early 1990s. Whereas an earlier painting by that name presented a desolate landscape of acrid colors, savage clear-cut vegetation, and the deadpan inclusion of an alarm clock as pun, the identically titled work in the Mounts show depicts a surreal landscape of some earth-analog, habitable-zone exoplanet somewhere in the universe, with aqua-colored waters, foggy pink skies, tendriling vegetation and frozen molten points of emerging rock spotting the planet's surface from foreground to the deep receding distance.
This world's morning could be the electron miscroscopic image of any old thing, looked at so close as to become frightening and familiar in equal part, like a Jurassic Park gnat, or the bristling somethings that cover the face of a fly.
Or maybe, if the intuitive spark of thought, dancing among dendrites, could be seen, we are seeing it in this Earth morning by Knopp.
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Mount B, Carla Knopp |
The Mounts series of smaller square works are titled simply as Mount from A to Z. In all these works, Knopp paints sculptural, center-composed forms of emerging rocky peaks. In Mount A, Mount B and Mount Q, the rugged spires are topped with gem-like capstones or with glass-like orbs atop the craggy, pustular mounts.
Each erupting image is a Devil's Tower of geological wonder amid soft-focused landscapes of muted, barely-pastel skies and sfumato rolling hills.
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Mount U, Carla Knopp |
In Mount U, a more sinister bristle of seemingly sexual thrust is depicted. The gray-orb at the peak of this mount is collared by a ring of thorns like a sprig of spikes on a honey locust tree.
Knopp would next exhibit new oil paintings at Harrison Center in Indianapolis in April 2010. The show called Spawn was covered in a detailed feature article by Mary Lee Pappas appearing in The Indianapolis Star on April 9.
In the article, Pappas covers Knopp's career of late, her processes and techniques, and her works in the latest show,
“In 2009, Knopp exhibited in New York and was featured in New American Paintings, a juried magazine. Later this spring, she has a show at the Russell/Projects gallery in Virginia.
Knopp's narrative works (in Spawn), which are executed on pod-shaped, non-symmetrical wood panels – some as large as 5 feet in diameter – exude an organic, feminine feel.
Taking an intentionally naive approach, Knopp has allowed herself to paint without inhibition. The results are a testament to her marked skills as a painter."
(Pappas then quotes Knopp)
" 'There's kind of a spawning in the creative process, so it's a very general term that just happens to work well with the imagery...
I just let myself paint circles, as many as I wanted...I just went ahead and let it happen.' ”
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Bridething (or Bride Thing), Carla Knopp |
Spawn was also reviewed by Dan Grossman in NUVO Newsweekly on April 15, 2010, where he writes,
“Estrogenie, Ripwreath and Bride Thing are some of the more interesting titles/coinages in this show of Carla Knopp's new paintings. Bride Thing is Knopp's depiction of a sort of wedding bouquet with greenish leaves and towers of red eyeball-like things protruding from it against a flesh-colored background. It's not exactly the kind of thing you'd want to see at your wedding but you have to at least admire the craftsmanship behind it.
Knopp's new paintings are on planes of wood...that she shaped and sanded herself. She takes full advantage of the shapes of her wood surfaces, ovals and pentagons among them, to frame her intuitive compositions.”
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Royal Toddler, Carla Knopp |
Looking now at the piece Royal Toddler, we see the overall outline of the wood panel shaped in the five lazy curves of a bloated star or portly gingerbread man. Inside the confines of the picture border, is an emergent revolving process of extrusion, rotation, formation and dissimulation. The pushing and pulling of color and form, along with the title, allude an ultrasound of an imperial fetus – with a fourth-dimensional zygote's-eye view of becoming. We see inside and outside, tossing and turning, past, present and future, all at once.
Evolutionary Leftovers.
In November 2011, a new venue for downtown artists opened with an expansion in the Circle City Industrial Complex on Brookside Avenue.
Called the South Studios, the new area of the 13 acre complex hosted artists' studios and exhibition spaces.
Tenants included a founding catalyst in Lug Waku and his 'Studio & Garage' space, painter/sculptor Matthew Davey and Carla Knopp with her new Dewclaw Gallery.
Knopp presented Lane Markers, a new series of paintings, in Dewclaw's first show, which was reviewed by Dan Grossman in NUVO on December 6, 2012. He begins his remarks with comments about the meaning of the gallery's name and its relation to a particular painting,
“A mammalian dewclaw may be vestigial, but it is not without interest from an evolutionary perspective. Accordingly, Carla Knopp's Lane Markers paintings...ruminate on vestigiality, on functionlessness.
Take, for example, Lastrada Estates, where you see termite-mound-like edifices in the foreground. What could they be for, we wonder...
...once you get past the...foreground, there's more to puzzle over. The Estates of this painting, a series of low-slung buildings in the background, could be trailers or mausoleums or something in between...
In...(this) oil on linen (painting) – as well as in the rest of the series – the muted pinks and earth tones contribute to an overall hypnotic effect enhanced by...the metallic ground they are painted on.”
Another painting in the show is one that I collected from the exhibition at the time – Obifia Forest.
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Obifia Forest, Carla Knopp |
The picture is an oil on linen fantasy landscape. A bare dirt road, glowing and gold, lined with mossy rocks on the way to a deep woods. Aside this path, some unknown structures, one like a leaning gazebo or carousel...
These human handiworks almost fade into a mist of atmosphere despite the highlights on their fanciful fretwork.
Overall, the painting is a tonal study in brown gold metallic and green. It's like a copper corrosion memory patina that brings to mind calliope music and antique Victorian postcards yellowing in the attic.
Dewclaw would go on to host additional exhibits by Knopp including her paintings in Kinkade Meets Turner Paints Sci-Fi With Fanbrush in 2012 and other solo shows by artists including Anita Giddings, Richard Nickolson, George Meluch, Kamilah Gill and Brian Fick over the course of the gallery's run. And the space would also later present tribute exhibitions for Jan Scott Boyer and Greg Brown.
A Somber Respite in Soothing Monochromes.
A late major show of Carla Knopp painted works would also occur at the Circle Center Industrial Complex South Studios in 2016.
In a series of same-sized, small pictures called Foodbox Portals, Knopp paints refrigerators as abstract off-white rectangles blending into minimalist backgrounds of gray and/or brown hazes. The diffuse and dreamy shapes remind of Rothko and his existentialist era.
Knopp presents the old ice box, not as a comfort food custodian stuffed with flavor and delight, but as forlorn doorways to quiet, fading memories – coffin-like vestiges of ancient ads, dust-colored, in stone.
If Samuel Beckett wrote copy for Frigidaire for the Pharaohs, you'd get a picture of the bleak dearth of Knopp's desolate appliance portraits.
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Foodbox 15, Carla Knopp |
These interesting and difficult works were reviewed by Dan Grossman in NUVO in the September 7, 2016 issue. He described several of the works in detail and some of his impressions are as follow,
“Let's just say that none of the refrigerators depicted here seem to be brand, spanking new, fresh out of the showroom. Foodbox 21 depicts a refrigerator that seems to be swallowed by the wall behind it, covered with multiple layers of decayed paint...Foodbox 22 resembles more a tombstone on a hill – a brown tombstone on a brown hill surrounded by brown sky...Foodbox 9 looks like what an abstract painting might look like if it were painted by Francis Bacon, in its brooding color choices, in its tarry accumulations of black paint. And Foodbox 24 doesn't really look like a food box – or a portal – at all. With its pink off-white color and a slit that verges on the vaginal, it looks like more like an animal carcass on a butcher's table.”
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Foodbox 24, Carla Knopp |
It might be fitting these paintings serve as a symbolic endpoint for the long analogue phase of Knopp's art career in Indianapolis. And perhaps a portal to what was to follow and continues to this day.
You Can't Put Oil Paint Back in the Tube.
The output of Carla Knopp would not slow down in the ensuing years. Although the numbers of her purely physical painting would diminish, she would reincorporate her ideas in new directions.
Her familiar obsessions would spawn and emerge again in her virtual reality arts which compel her creation now.
Her latest work consists of 3d spaces, or worlds, that must be experienced 'in-game' in the full reality of their VR splendor to be fully appreciated (some links below).
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La Loma, Carla Knopp, virtual world screen capture |
Entering these worlds, traversing their terrain, teleporting through passageways, standing in grand halls...
There is a feeling of both déjà vu and discovery.
A thread of a whispering song weaves through all of Knopp's art, and remains in her latest virtual works, composed on the computer in a series of zeroes and ones, that when shuffled and compiled, and sorted just so, organize the impossible – nothing and something – into scenes of an inexplicable everything.
Her paintings serve as a diagram of future dreams, Frankensteined to life via microchips and computer code.
A Morning on Earth that never ends, but cycles endlessly like energy in space.
What were once pictures on a wall, are now a hyperdrive of energized frozen moments – millions of flickering movies, on zillions of scrying screens – an art befitting our new electronic era.
But unlike AI, which is a rehash of everything that came before, at least at the time of this writing and until the singularity, Knopp uses modern technology like the Impressionists used the marvelous invention of oil colors in portable tubes.
And for what particular reason is Knopp's to know and her artworks to allude.
The modern artists' code is to break new ground, to go where no one has gone before. Try as you may, progress cannot march in reverse. Like the Impressionists with their new-fangled tubes. Hi ho, hi ho, from inside to outside they go. From studio to field, to capture the ever changing Earth.
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Morning on Earth, Carla Knopp, virtual world screen capture |
See Also:
Mark Diekhoff, June 2026
for Mitchell E. Marlow, 1964-2026, neverending laughter and friend for life
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