HOUSTON, TX.- The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is presenting Christopher Knowles: In a Word. Brooklyn-based artist Christopher Knowles is most often regarded as a poet and painter, yet his output is broader than this classification suggests. The exhibition brings to Texas his most comprehensive survey to date, spans many mediums—text, sound, painting, drawing, sculpture, and recorded performance—and includes works completed in collaboration with esteemed theater director Robert Wilson. The exhibition will continue through March 25, 2018.

Christopher Knowles: In a Word features works that record and reorder the everyday materials around us through the use of incantatory rhythms and repetitions. Knowles’s works include typewritten drawings of language permutations, reimagined song lyrics, and painting in which interlocking blocks of raw color depict family, close friends, and architectural landmarks.

Knowles’s sculptures are precise and direct in their construction: polka- dotted cones, brilliantly-hued paper cutouts, Lego structures, and collections of wind-up alarm clocks. Taken together, Knowles’s art places him squarely in conversations with Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Stuart Sherman, Paul Thek, and other twentieth-century artists who opened a large window on do-it-yourself production, interiority, and the shifting registers of the artist’s voice in social settings.

“Top 40 hits, relations between people, tour stops, favored items, radio advertisements, and the presidents: all get recounted and reordered and redefined with regularity into playful and delicate if blunt patterns” in Knowles’s art explains Anthony Elms, the organizing curator. The familiarity of objects and subjects within the works draw in the viewer, but their restructuring forces a reconsideration of meaning and hierarchies of visual culture. A series of American flags built from Legos are juxtaposed with advertising slogans drawn with markers. All elements are equally familiar and yet made strange by their combinations.

Christopher Knowles: In a Word is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania and is curated by ICA Chief Curator Anthony Elms and guest curator Hilton Als, writer and chief theater critic for The New Yorker. The presentation at CAMH is facilitated by Curator Dean Daderko.

Christopher Knowles has exhibited his works widely throughout the world including: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Of Mice and Men: 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York. He has performed solo or as part of the Byrd Hoffman company extensively, including: White Columns, New York, New York; Thalia Theatre, Hamburg, Germany; The Kitchen, New York, New York; the Louvre Museum, Paris, France; and touring duets with Robert Wilson the world-over.