JOHN KNECHT: NOO FEWCHUR

On exhibit in the Project Room: a 15-channel video installation playing 15 individual channels of animated spacescapes by Hallwalls Artist-in-Residence Project (HARP) artist John Knecht . Curated by Chris Borkowski.

Multi-media artist John Knecht returns to Buffalo with a new body of work consisting of fifteen wall mounted video monitors playing fifteen individual video channels of animated spacescapes titled "noo fewchur". Knecht’s work was last shown in Buffalo in a retrospective show titled "Animating Destiny" presented by the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University in the fall of 1997. In these new animations, asteroids and odds and ends flash by with an imagined sound track superimposed on a naturally soundless environment. Noo fewchur presents an environment of comic terror where color, movement, and sound orbit around a layer of apprehension and real concern for the future.

noo future is in part inspired by and pays homage to an embryotic multi-media installation by George Hale. In 1905 Hale retired from his position as Chief of the Kansas City Fire Department and moved west to Los Angeles. In that same year he exhibited publicly, for profit, a multiple projection film installation which he titled "Hale’s Tours". To produce this nascent muli-media installation Hale took one of Edison’s early cameras and proceeded to film the landscape out of each window of a moving passenger train car. He then projected those films using multiple projectors, back onto the out side of the windows of a similar rail car which he purchased and installed inside of a building. He further enhanced the effect by placing the car on a slight off balance pivot which allowed the car to be physically rocked as the films were being projected on the windows. For a nickel the spectator could sit in a seat in the car and experience a voyage through the western landscape. Noo fewchur celebrates "Hale’s Tours" wackiness and eccentric use of the moving image as an element of the re-constructed simulacra of the natural environment.

Knecht further elaborates on the imputus for noo furchur by stating "As the world enters a new Millennium and the United States enters a new era of political recklessness, I am pondering the varriedscape which is flying by my window. I am metaphorically thinking about space junk and the apparent disregard for the total environment both terra and firma. I bring you a spacescape of used condoms and crescent wrenches forgotten by some astronaut floating beyond the perimeters of earth. I give you Asteroids full of unknown viruses and long dormant mischief hurling toward us in a spectacle of light and color. Oh the radiance!"

Knecht’s work is a hybrid form of analog and digital animation. His animations exist in a duplicity of simplicity and sophistication that is reflexive and reminiscent of early film making, as well early computer graphics and video games. Stylistically, Knecht’s work may first appear as simple animations that could be hand drawn or rendered by early 8-bit computers, but a closer examination reveals a highly sophisticated style where modern processors are harnessed to render out a hybrid and bleeding edge style of animation. Embracing a style evocative of early animations and cartoons injected with a good dose Atari-esque hype and pixle aesthetics, Knecht constructs densely layered animations that far surpass the technical and thematic limits of the aforementioned. Thematically, his animations can range from the meditative and hauntingly beautiful, where terror and serenity exist in the same realm, to fast-paced-car-wreck-shoot-em-up-rock-n-roll adrenaline rides of self-destruction.

Even more remarkable is the method in which Knecht produces his animations. Using handdrawn illustrations, found footage and appropriated materials from early films and industrial footage, Knecht first digitizes the materials and then painstakingly rotoscopes out elements and images (with a computer mouse in hand) in PhotoShop that are then animated and composited with other layers and rendered into digital video. Knecht’s work often pays homage to early filmmaking, avant-garde cinema, pop art, and "outsider" art, his highly visceral style will appeal to visual artists, painters, illustrators, filmmakers, and media artists alike.

John Kecht is a Professor at Colgate University’s department of Art and Art History where he teaches video production and cinema history and theory courses. Over the last 27, years,his work has been internationally screened and exhibited in various film and media festivals, as well as art galleries, including the World Wide Film and Video Festival at the Hagg,The European Media Arts festival in Osnäbruck, Germany, MOMA Museum of Modern Art (NYC), The Brooklyn Museum, and the California Institute for the Arts (Valencia, CA) to name just a few. In 1994 Knecht was also awarded a fellowship in Computer Arts by NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) and currently he sits on their Artist -Advisory Committee.

Please join us the evening prior to his gallery opening on Friday March 16th at 8PM when we will present John Knecht and his videos and single channel works in our cinema. Samples of Knetch’s more recent work from his "Wobble Dobble Serise" can be found in our on-line cinema.

Some publications related to this event:
March, 2001 - 2001