PRESS RELEASE
A Noiseless Patient Spider , October 22 - November 26, 2016 

Linnea Kniaz’s first post-MFA solo exhibition finds the artist extending her sculptural, painting- based installations to the architecture of the gallery space. 55” above the floor, Kniaz has embedded a 2x2” railing around the entire perimeter of the gallery, plastered in and painted white. Along one side of the space this thin shelf lifts off the wall entirely, itself remaining straight as it serves to emphasize the curvature of the gallery’s own construction. Temple against the wall, you might be able to see a tiny sliver of red, or maybe just its mauvy reflection, glowing against the bend in the wall; a gentle indicator of the subtleties at play throughout Kniaz’s installation.

By the front window several small sculptures dot the floor; a sparing assemblage of objects made out of wood, foam, paper, wire, polyester, brick and paint. A leafless branch and painted chair leg lay nearby; a giant California pine cone props up a small wooden table. These structural materials are at once withdrawn yet fully nude, performing an open ecology where objects and their surroundings begin to take on each others’ characteristics. They challenge the viewer with a whole composed from similar yet indeterminate parts; a unified presence of spatial, material, and teleological uncertainty.

Drawing inspiration from the Supports/Surfaces movement of the late 1960s, Kniaz’s sculptures expose a hidden poetics masked on the borders of painting and architecture. In a circular dance, her work often begins from the measurements of its containing room. There is an open precariousness to her gestures, producing a constant tension between what makes a work spatially dependent or stand alone. Often departing from language, here the etymology of the word “patient” is put to work in two ways: as n. - something requiring an action and adj. - bearing or supporting. A Noiseless Patient Spider hangs in a window between two rooms, steadily scoring its own choreography of space.

--Chris Adler, VACANCY LA


A Noiseless Patient Spider
By Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.