Through creating different contexts and situations, from printing a traditional gelatin print of the blank layer in Photoshop to coloring walls and ceilings by filtering existing light sources, Kyle Knodell looks at how meaning is formed and constructed. His work roots in a process were ideas concerning the display and presentation of various and often disparate subjects join one-another, drawing attention to contradictions and misunderstandings that emerge during our construction of meaning and the failure of completely rational readings.
For the current exhibition, Knodell has installed a series of photographs, together with a video, in a physical context consisting of podiums and pedestals. The placement of the images in a sculptural three-dimensional context renders them as tactile objects that continuously refer back to themselves and their physical form. Knodell's installation dissolves the idea of the photograph as illusion and constant referent – and thus not truly existent form of being – and lets it become an object on its own physical terms.
The photographs function as triggers, unmoved movers who start a chain reaction and finally become a centre part in the “poetic entanglement of meanings” that is the final presentation.
The obscurity and complexity of the installation pushes us to refocus our view of the photographs. In relating the different – but, in their anonymity and their every-day-ness, intimately connected – elements Knodell presents us with a display of the fragility of matter that comments and questions our perception of reality.
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