Vanessa McKnight graduated with a BFA from SAIC in 1998 and is currently in the process of relocating to Chicago. The following is the press release, as seen on her website, from her 2008 exhibition Trespassing at Hardcore Art Contemporary in Miami, FL.
TRESPASSING Vanessa McKnight's lusciously painted narratives stem from her need to conceptually glamorize the state of anxiety inherent in today's world. She chooses to paint specific frames from 1950's and 60's films as a tool to depict the tension present in the human condition in a way she refers to as "cinematic realism". In her work Longing to Slip From Context from the film Houdini (Tony Curtis), Vanessa depicts a marrying of a lavishly euphoric color scheme and a dark, unsettling subject matter. The subject is perhaps dead, floating beneath the ice, but his face is brightly colored and beautiful --a glamorized ideal man. Houdini, the greatest escape artist ever, gives us the hope that there is a way out of here, a glorious path of breathtaking magic. Nostalgia, the dreamscape, and the familiar is what anchors Vanessa to film. As she states,"l grew up watching old movies; they are almost as much part of my personal history as my real life. My family has always referenced and quoted movies as metaphors for what's happening in our own lives".
Through the stills in movies, she evolves a kind of self-protective cool that enables her and her viewers to experience emotional reality as if at a distance. In addition, she states, "I am fascinated by the altered world in film. I love the colors, textures and movement -- the celluloid feel that separates the filmed world of movies, television, and video from the actual world in which we live." Like Marilyn Minter she uses high drama, close cropping and palpable texture to seduce the viewer, create ambiguity, and transmit tension. Whereas Marilyn uses the grotesque,Vanessa employs the sensual in her visual dialogue.
There is something unsettlingly mysterious about Vanessa's work The films are her auxiliary memories and safety net -- a refuge from one's treacherous being. The enigmatic characters in her paintings seem to be in a constant state of flux; mirroring life's shifting balance between foreground and background -harmony and chaos. Like Gerhard Richter's early works, the images she portrays tend to be blurred, vague and emotionally charged. In her painting The Toward and Froward Tide from the film Splendor in the Grass (Natalie Wood), Vanessa creates a juicy acidic landscape in which a normal scene (of a woman taking a bath) is transformed into an explosive, vivid moment of ambiguity. The bath water becomes the tide washing to and fro -- consuming the subject in the way mundane reality can sometimes take on disturbingly epic and intense proportions.
Vanessa's psychologically charged paintings challenge the audience perception of the "fictional" realm of our lives. As Vanessa states, "There is a collectively unconscious fine line these days between feeling the potential impending doom of the human condition and the desire to escape our destiny through sybaritic pleasure and beauty. The paradox makes for a heady experience that I wish to express in my work." In the current exhibition her poetic scenarios capture our attention by ultimately leading us to question our state -- are we trespassing reality or fiction?
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