Content

Preface

Crossing the borders of photography, Somerset House, London

Peindre la nuit, Centre Pompidou, Metz

Memories arrested in space, Italian Cultural Institute, London

Compression, Artuner, Brussels

Contemporary Photography Forum, Boca Raton Museum, Boca Raton

Command-Alternative-Escape, Arsenale Novissimo, Venice

After Image, Cassina Projects curated by Artuner, New York

High Anxiety, Rubell Family Collection, Miami

Project 1049, Gstaad

Spotlight: Interview with Eugenio Re Rebaudengo & Paul Kneale

Moscow International Biennale for Young Art of 2016

Biography / CV

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Paul Kneale

PREFACE

Born in 1986 in Canada, Paul Kneale received his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art (London) in 2011. He lives and works in Toronto.

Paul Kneale is interested in how the world is constantly translated into a digital language which simplifies, trivialises and depersonalises content and the people it addresses. The artist explores the way in which digital facets of our existence can be manifested and reimagined in the flesh of the physical object.

The artist has been manipulating cheap scanners to generate a unique way of painting. Rather than capturing an image, the scanner creates an impression of the ambient light within the artist’s studio, bearing the abstract visual trace of the atmosphere surrounding the machine. The process is integral to his new works: the scanner paintings are built up from unique impressions and display multiple layers and striations often between trans-parent sheets and the colours resulting from varying light conditions in the artist’s studio.

The contrast between machines and their serial products results in what Paul Kneale de-fines as the “new abject”. In response to Julia Kristeva’s 1980 text ‘Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection’, the artist identifies a “new abject” for the information technology.

Describing today’s inherent revulsion for brand new materials, he pinpoints a disorienta-tion in the consciousness of time and location, caused by our immaterial inhabitation of new technologies. This sentiment is embodied in works which often address, in original and innovative ways and media, the simultaneity and layering occurring in our ever-linked virtual existences.

Kneale, in an interview with i-D, defines the Internet as ‘a whole way of being in the world’. His practice aims at investigating the role of art in this new enigmatic dimension. Paul Kneale is an artist that explores the possible physical manifestations of the digital. His oeuvre reflects on the implications of algorithms and information flux. While these may seem very abstract entities, they constitute and shape our domestic daily environ-ment.

CROSSING THE BORDERS OF PHOTOGRAPHYDead House, Somerset House, London, May 2019

‘Crossing the Borders of Photography’, a group exhibition featuring Des Lawrence, Tabor Robak, Paul Kneale and Ana Elisa Egreja explores how the medium of photog-raphy is constantly being reinvented, challenged, and reworked into contemporary artistic expressions.

The introduction of photography in the realm of fine art in the late 1800s represent-ed a watershed moment: it changed forever the trajectory of painting and introduced a new way of conceptualising ‘medium’ in the world of art.

In a similar way today the fast paced advancement of image-making equipment has led to the introduction of numerous technologies that do not only arguably surpass traditional analogue photography in accuracy, but also constantly challenge it and push the boundaries of what it means to photographically capture a fleeting moment.Far from suggesting that the medium of photography is becoming obsolete, we pro-pose to explore the boundaries where digital technologies are expanding and enrich-ing the photographic realm, where contemporary artists are finding a field of enquiry that is engaging and speaks deeply to the core of contemporaneous society.

Paul Kneale employs the scanner to create non-figurative paintings in a way that mirrors the photographic process, in that he exposes and captures light. However, the absence of the camera and the represented object puts the focus squarely on the technological and mechanical aspects of photography. Kneale questions its tech-niques, blurring the boundaries between analogue as well as digital photography and painting, creating a medium with its own unique image structure and appeal to the viewer.

PEINDRE LA NUITCentre Pompidou, Metz, October 2018

Paul Kneale features in ‘Peindre la Nuit’, a group exhibition at Centre Pompidou Metz, curated by Jean Marie Gallais.

The exhibition explores the theme of the “night”, through the eyes of Post-War and contemporary artists who have been inspired by this magical, sensual, and mysterious time.

The night has always been a major source of inspiration in the history of art, and continues to fascinate 20th century and contemporary artists. Today, it remains a field of prolific experiences. If the proposition may initially seem contradictory, “peindre la nuit” (painting the night) is, in fact, very rich in meaning.

Using a perceptual approach rather than an iconographic one, this exhibit is conceptualised as a nocturnal experience; an evening stroll that utterly transforms the viewer into a temporary night owl.

The exhibit trajectory is set up as a journey that follows the evolution of our senses and our perceptions at night time. After the undecided twilight, we lose ourselves in the darkness’ impervious intensity. Our eyes then adjust, and the forms before us are refined, colours begin to appear, phenomenons come to light, and culminate to opening new inner worlds.

In line with the spirit of the exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, ‘Peindre la nuit’ is not exclusively limited to painting (though it is central), but it finds resonance and parallels with with music and literature in particular, as well as with video and photography. It brings together historical figures (Winslow Homer, Francis Bacon, Anna-Eva Bergman, Louise Bourgeois, Brassaï, Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Klee, Lee Krasner, Henry Michaux, Joan Mitchell, Amédée Ozenfant …) but also contemporary artists (Etel Adnan, Charbel-Joseph Boutros, Peter Doig, Jennifer Douzenel, Rodney Graham, Martin Kippenberger, Paul Kneale, Olaf Nicolai, Gerhard Richter …) as well as spectacular installations (Harold Ancart, Spencer Finch, Daisuke Yokota, Navid Nuur …).

MEMORIES ARRESTED IN SPACEItalian Cultural Institute, London, September 2018

This new series represents the most evolved position of Paul Kneale’s “Scanner Paintings” process, and sees Kneale directly challenging the relationship of the painted mark to the painter. The mark, which has since the abstract expressionists been symbolic of the artist’s

time-bound subjectivity, is now ‘radically denatured by its digital replication and counterfeit’.

Kneale’s painterly swipes are deceitful, the sincerity of their expression is challenged. The picture appears emotional and deeply expressive of the painter’s psychology, but on closer inspection the image is revealed to be speaking in false tongues. It is like an off-the-job actor: the audience recognises him from his last role, his body performs the familiar actions in its familiar form but they

COMPRESSIONArtuner, Brussels, April 2018

The Paul Kneale’s ‘Event Horizon’ sculptural series investigates the con-temporary urban landscape, probing the boundaries between what we ex-perience as the ‘everyday’ and what can be described as the ‘new abject’.Also for this series the artist works with range of mundane, daily objects, repur-posed and altered so that they simultaneously evoke a sense of alienation and fa-

miliarity in the viewer. The selected objets trouvés are finally crowned with a hover-ing neon halo: the tempered glass tubes are filled with free-flowing noble gases whose random interactions with each other and an electric current produce a blazing glow.The title ‘Event Horizon’ references the edge of a black hole, the place from which no light escapes and also time stops. The metallic mobiles created for this exhibition float in the gal-lery space like discarded satellite or rocket parts: space junk - material aimlessly wandering our solar system, an immense space that we are not even inhabiting yet, but that we have, nonetheless, already littered with both physical debris and the sheer clutter of our digital data.

CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY FORUMBoca Raton Museum, Boca Raton, November 2017

The Boca Raton Museum of Art’s newly created Photography Forum has been established to present the work of emerging to mid-career artists working in the ever-changing me-dium of photography. With nearly 1,600 important historical photographs in the Museum’s collection, it is important to look at how the medium has evolved and where it stands today.

Abstract photography gained appreciation and recognition as a realm for experimenta-

tion in the early 20th century. Throughout the second half of the century, the medium was re-defined by new technologies and formats, most notably color photography and subse-quently large-format printing. Representational photography remained dominant until the past few decades. The birth of digital photography – and the tools that accompany it, such as scanners, Inkjet printers and Photoshop – engendered a new generation of photographers.

Three distinct voices in a milieu of artists, Daniel Gordon, Paul Kneale, and Flo-rian Maier-Aichen are redefining a moment when everything started to change.

COMMAND-ALTERNATIVE-ESCAPEArsenale Novissimo, La Biennale di Venezia 57°, May 2017

Paul Kneale’s work is featured in a special presentation at Thetis Gar-dens, in the Arsenale Novissimo, coinciding with La Biennale di Ven-ezia 57°.

COMMAND-ALTERNATIVE-ESCAPE is a group exhibition or-ganised by the School of Curatorial Studies in Venice, in the pres-tigious Thetis Gardens, a leafy oasis in the Arsenale Novissimo, only a few steps away from the main Biennale display VIVA ARTE VIVA.

Exploring the increasingly blurred boundaries of private and public life, COMMAND-ALTERNATIVE-ESCAPE reflects on the arche-typal dichotomy between freedom and security. Visitors were con-fronted with a new large-scale sculptural installation by Paul Kneale, along with artworks by Joseph Beuys, Jan Fabre, Michelangelo Pisto-letto, Allora & Calzadilla, and Jesse Darling.

Paul Kneale continues his investigation on the relationship between abstract, sometimes cosmic theories – which exist as ideas – and the scale of the human body that contemplates them. The works are things in the world, which the body encounters daily. The found ob-jects explore this near body-scale and exist in an in-between space, neither consumer objects, nor made from scratch. Their shape has been altered, suffering dents and blows; paint is stripped away and surfaces are melted or warped.

The neon tubes are themselves a small simulacrum of the cosmic, made using the noble gasses neon and argon. The gasses are con-tained in the glass tubes and the illumination is activated by high volt-age electricity passing through them.

The series has been developing across a number of exhibitions and has recently been shown at Palazzo Capris Torino, Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Rubell Family Collection, and Cassina Pro-jects NYC (in an exhibition curated by ARTUNER).

AFTER IMAGE: TOBY ZIEGLER & PAUL KNEALECassina Projects curated by Artuner, New York, February 2017

Stare into to the maxed-out brightness of your smartphone, tablet, or monitor and hold your gaze there. Notice how its immediate surroundings become darker. Now turn away and close your eyes; an optical echo of the screen will remain. This technically termed afterimage is a perceptual slippage that arises from the residual activity of the nerve cells situated in the back of the eye, retaining light even after its source is gone.

Taken literally however, the idiom After Image could also suggest the way in which the historical medium of images – painting – is today blended into a flattened and universal space, replicated, altered and spread across systems and devices. This exhi-bition presents two artists whose work moves between these two poles of After Im-age/afterimage, the physical and the digital. Both employ strategies that challenge the reading of a transmitted image’s symbolic detritus, while also disrupting the ba-sic reality claims of reproductive technology’s lenses, sensors, chips and screens. While their approaches are drastically different, they share a concern for how to critically continue the discourse of painting, embracing the revolutionary techno-

HIGH ANXIETY Rubell Family Collection, Miami, December 2016

Canadian-born artist Paul Kneale was selected to have his work featured at the Rubell Family Collection’s exhibition High Anxi-ety: New Acquisitions, in August 2017.

About the museum

Established in 1964 in New York by Donald and Mera Ru-bell, and since moved to Miami in 1993, the RFC is one of the world’s largest privately owned contemporary art collections. The 40,000 square foot building continues to expand, and fea-tures acclaimed artists including Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Michel Basquiat. In 1994, the Contemporary Arts Foundation (CAF) was created to expand the RFC’s public mission as a con-temporary art museum. The RFC continues to exhibit and buy work from emerging artists working at the cutting edge of con-temporary art.

About the exhibition

High Anxiety: New Acquisitions presents selections of artworks from 32 artists acquired by the Rubell’s since 2014, many of whom explore polarizing social and political concerns through a broad spectrum ofcontemporary artistic practices. In gauging the output and energies of these artists we find creative currents that speak to our shared state of uncertainty, nervousness and pessimism. “Artists help us comprehend and grapple with the critical issues in our lives,” says Mera Rubell.”

Along with Paul Kneale, other distinguished artists like Frank Benson, Karl Holmqvist and Katja Novitskova will be featured. The works aim to speak to the state of uncertainty our current political climate has created.

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PROJECT 1049Gstaad, July 2016

Project 1049 is a site-specific curatorial initiative led by Paul Kneale and Raphael Hefti. Set in the Swiss mountain town of Gstaad, the exhibition draws upon the notion of ‘project space’ as a platform upon which anything is possible. Bringing together a diverse array of poets, artists, and writers, Project 1049 is a show wherein various mediums coa-

lesce to develop artists’ ideas and methodologies within a progressive, non-traditional atmosphere. Within this collective exhibition, Kneale has created his own body of work that helps to investigate an immediate place and its surrounding atmosphere. Using a variety of materials, Kneale turns aspects native to Gstaad into a complex chain of outsourced images, drawings, and sculptures. Indeed, through this project, Paul Kneale reflects on processes of creation in contemporary culture, where pre-existing ideas are taken, reinterpreted, outsourced, translated and given form to create the final product.

SPOTLIGHT:Interview with Eugenio Re Rebaudengo & Paul Kneale

Could you explain the process of the making of your scanner paintings?

These works are made with consumer grade printer/scanners; cheap machines that can be bought almost anywhere, like the 24 Hour Tesco Superstore near my studio. I use quite a few different models, and at the moment I’ve probably got 5 or 6 in the studio. They each have their own visual personality, and I also break them pretty regularly in the process of making the work, doing things with them they’re not designed to do. The images are made by using the scan function with the lid open and nothing on the bed, making an image of the surface of the glass, the space above, and the light conditions in the studio at the time: daylight, darkness, neon lights.

The image is also affected by the resolution of the scan. A 72dpi scan looks different than a 1200dpi scan, and continues to change in combination with other factors (such as light). The different resolutions, the exposures times necessary for them, also take different amounts of time, from a few seconds to maybe half an hour or more. I sometimes use basic sub-strates, low grade office supply materials like printable trans-parencies, to run through the print function simultaneously while the scan is being made, which makes a transparent print from the commercial RGB inks. These transparency prints can be fed back through with another scan on top, or themselves can be scanned. With this layering, and the different expo-sures used, you get a kind of time sandwich. A fast, low reso-lution scan over a slow high resolution. So the image of time that is represented becomes complicated and multiplied. Also, the cheap scanners can’t really handle this stuff, so they will wrongly interpret the colours they have just printed, producing wild acid tones and neons in the scan of it. Or the machine will jam when passing the plastic sheet back through again, ripping or even melting it. So some marks of the physical body of the machine can become visible, in addition to its image-making disposition. In the final works the files are used to embed the image into the surface of an archival canvas at a large scale. This material, aside from its historical use in painting, allows an amazing depth of colour and detail from the inks used.

Does your use of the scanner aim at questioning the sacred-ness of the artist’s gesture, the importance of the artist’s hand? What do you find most fascinating about the machines?

With these scanners I like that on the one hand, they’re incred-ible, technological, image-creating devices. They can transfer an image by scan from a physical object with an incredible amount of detail, far beyond what our eyes can see, and they can also reproduce images by print in seconds onto anything that you can manage to feed through the print tray. On the other hand, they’re designed to be trash — the really cheap

ones, that I buy for around £40, have these brittle plastic cas-es, parts that don’t quite fit properly together, missing screws, that kind of thing. But they’re somehow still really beautiful objects in their complex fragility. They’re not designed to last, so you have to keep buying a new one. It is essentially high-tech garbage. Already corrupted in its brand new state. In relation to the artists hand, I don’t think there’s ever been a moment when the process of representation wasn’t aided by some de-vice. Even if it was just a hollow stick to blow berry juice around the outline of your hand onto a cave wall, or a camera obscura to transfer a figure onto a gridded block of marble for carving. The technological object is always a prothesis of the will of the person who wields it. The thing might have characteristics that are inherent to its structure, what we might call a disposition. This would be like the particular kind of image that you get out of the different scanners, or how oil paint looks different from spray paint. What is interesting is the play between this disposition in the technology, however advanced or not, and the artists will to use it for an unanticipated or unintended end. Productive misuse is a way to understand things.

In a way, one may say you use the scanner as a sort of cam-era; you capture a fleeting moment in its light and passing visual qualities. The result is a visual recording of the space surrounding you. In this regard, how does your practice relate to photography?

Well I think everyone’s practice relates to photography be-cause everyone is a photographer now. There are billions of camera phones on the planet today. Facebook alone can up-load six billion photos a month. So on the one hand, photos to-day are a kind of trash. A digital excess. And a lot of this excess is very aesthetically considered! The idea of editing the colour cast or sharpness of an image is something that everyone is familiar with on Instagram etc. and performs intuitively now, shaping their images to correspond to aesthetics of advertising, fine art and countless other identifiable styles. In relation to this scenario of aestheticised excess, I also think that a digital photo is always already a painting. What I mean by that is kind of technical. The way light is recorded by an RGB sensor in a digital camera has a fundamental ontological difference from film. With film you could say there’s a causal trace. A transfer from the light reflecting off an object(s) which imprints onto the negative.

Barthes wrote a whole book about that. But with a digi-tal camera sensor, the light is immediately interpreted into a binary code that’s then used to recreate the im-age on a screen, or multiple, maybe unlimited screens. There’s no trace at all, but rather a system of points of colour and pixels. This system is an approximation of what we think the old-type image created by the light should look like, it is how we generalise about photographic perspective and light recording. This is programmed into the digital cameras software, and it approximates both how our vision works, and how we’re used to seeing photographic images. Its already a radical form of interpretation that relies on complex frameworks and aesthetic choices to arrive at a ‘natu-ralistic’ construction. To me this is definitely all in the realm of painting. Its 100% interpretive on the side of the technology. So the scanner is to the digital photo what a photogram is to film. Its a more direct way of producing the image, according to the technology’s in-herent dispositions. It doesn’t use a lens to collect the light onto the sensor, but instead has a flat glass plate, and produces its own light via an LED strip that passes below the plate, bouncing the light from whatever is there or above it down onto the sensor, which moves with the light as a unit. So there is a spatial element to the capture system. A distance travelled by the device back and forth. So the image making element has to traverse across the surface to make the image — not that unlike a brush in the former painting!

Is it right to say that your “scanner paintings” in some sense translate a physical environment into the ab-stract language of the digital?

As they are a record of the conditions in the environ-ment, I would say yes. But the digital is also a mate-rial realm, and I think we are just getting comfortable with this idea now. It is the intersection of these two material environments which is particularly interesting; translations of matter and form are both happening

here. And we have a new hybridity which we are also developing a language for. But I also don’t necessarily think of them as ‘abstract’ in the ‘art history’ frame. To me abstraction is about starting at something thats definable, an image or narrative, and moving away from it into gesture and symbol. I think the Post-post-post production works are about an attempt to more directly represent something which is at the boundaries or limits of what we can label as a thing: time, and also light and space in a given place and moment. The images produced do represent those things, but these things are in themselves abstrac-tions! The physical thing is preserved, but it shows it to you in a way that you probably didn’t notice it in your environment. Like for example on the very long scans you can see the flicker of the neon lights, which happens at a wavelength we don’t perceive. So there are some parts of the visual universe that can be re-vealed in their strangeness by this crappy, wonderful Chinese plastic scanner.

Your practice is concerned with the transformation language has gone through since the advent of the Internet. Can you tell us how your SEO & Co. pro-ject at Tank.tv last year addressed this issue?

SEO & Co. began with a talk I participated in at the ICA in London, organised by Lunch Bytes, that in-volved me, Boris Groys, Wendy Chun, and Ben Vick-ers. As you would expect, the ICA made a video of the talk and uploaded it to their YouTube channel. YouTube is of course owned by Google, and Google makes all its money from online advertising.They ob-viously want to know exactly what’s contained in the things you’re uploading so they can display relevant ads alongside. With a text heavy content this is easy, but with something like a 2 hour video of a lecture, they need to transform that. So they use a speech to text translation on the uploaded videos to turn all of whats said into #’s and adwords.

So the transcript of the talk produced is pretty abstract and distorted, and omits any names of the various speakers, run-ning the whole thing together in one flow. I wanted to reap-propriate this content back from Google, to make some part of it mine again, but also to return it to a real place, after the opaque and diffuse place of it existing on servers. So I used the text to create a screenplay, and had friends of mine who are also artists, poets, musicians, read the scripts in various lo-cations around the abandoned library in South London that I use as a studio. The recordings became the basis for a 5-chan-nel video installation, which was presented on screens I made from materials that were extracted from the studio building. In some scenes the script becomes like a group recital of poetry, going back and forth between the characters, while in others its a single reader. There’s also a little non-sequitur extracted from the YouTube version and incorporated into the work as

a performative element: when I finished watching the original ICA upload of the talk, YouTube gave me a ‘watch next sugges-tion’ of a clip of a CD being zapped in a microwave (I had been watching similar stuff). So in one channel of the work the char-acters are destroying CDs in a microwave while delivering their lines. There’s another channel of the video that just focuses on this. The little lighting storms and fires it produces!

What do you think is the effect of new technologies upon cre-ativity and imagination? Do the ways in which they make our life simpler have a negative impact on the human ability to create something new? Or, on the contrary, do technological innovations spur creativity?

Well I think first of all they reframe the question of ‘creativity’ in general. What does it mean to be able to so powerfully yet so easily produce images, forms and sounds from a set of pre-fabricated aesthetic templates? Who’s responsible for these output forms? And when is the thing fixed and final? We’ve be-come incredible replicators. So it makes us more in tune with flows and instability, loops and variations, which have always been closer to the spirit of human culture than closed eternal forms. I think it also shifts the idea of ‘new’ from the thing nev-er done before, to the simply new in time. New shoes rather than New Age. This has a flattening effect on our perception of ourselves in history, but maybe this is the really final stage of our deconstructed understandings of the myths and narratives of human progress and a post-capitalist sensibility toward ma-terials. Flat Cola set to boil. We’re really having to grapple with these types of objects now. I think of this as like a-historical materialism. A deep affinity to understand a substance outside of a narrative that gives it a social reason, or the social reason being quite sociopathic. Like Pirandello’s characters searching for an author. The relationship with imagination is harder to parse. Consciousness is a toss up. Mis- and dis-information at the same time. Creativity is ultimately just a label for things we don’t understand the process of that manifest some spontane-ous seeming meaning or structure. So its a retrospective label for idiosyncratic processes.

You often talk about the “new abject”: can you explain this concept and how it relates to your work?

The New Abject is a way of thinking about the psychological

relationship one has to certain material experiences in con-temporary globalised and network culture. I’ve written an essay about it recently which was published by dreamingofstream-ing.com. It was parasitically hosted on craigslist.com — I broke the essay into chunks and posted it in the London Arts section — which is otherwise some kind of shady nude modelling and hookup forum. So the posts expired after the standard 45 days, and now its being made into an ebook by Dan Solbach, which I’m really excited about and should be launched very soon. To really try and turn the concept into a soundbite, I would say that the more well known paradigm of ‘abjection’ involves bod-ily excrement and decay. Blood, shit, corpses. There’s a bio-logical and psychological revulsion, a flight response towards these substances. This is because we have evolved to recog-nise potential sources of disease and contamination, as well as the mental need to consider ones body and consciousness as distinct from nothingness, which is confronted of course by a dead body. So the new abject is a scenario I’ve been com-ing to understand for a few years, where one experiences this involuntary compulsion to flee, or finds revulsion in materials, objects and experiences which are not bodily or dirty, but com-pletely new, clean and high-tech. This is because these scenar-ios replicate the ontological rupture that is the signal to trigger your abjection response. Many of the subjects and materials I work with can be discussed in this realm. The cheap but high-tech scanners, the digital distortion of an intellectual discus-sion to create advertising copy, the trace of the hand morphed into a vector file.

How would you describe the South London art scene? Has this environment influenced your practice in any way?

The South London scene for me has been a really active and im-portant background for my work. I’ve lived here now for longer than anywhere else since I left home at 18! The abandoned public Library, where I have my studio together with Megan Rooney, Raphael Hefti, Harry Burke and Gabriele Beveridge has been an important centre of my South London.We found it just as I was finishing school and it made such a difference to have a huge space to work. We’re also always hosting people that are passing through London to do shows at various places, which I really like, kind of a no-charge Airbnb.

It keeps the energy high. We’ve also been able to do some artist-run pro-jects through our space that started here called Library+, which become itinerate when it was discovered we were illegally doing it. Though we’ve also used the model and crew for an off-site project in Paris last year. Hav-ing that kind of free space in central London is a real luxury, and I think we’ve made good use and abuse of it, from very identifiable art type stuff to music performances and serving fruit punch spiked with LSD. I’ve also made a series of works from the exterior sign of the building I managed to have il-licitly removed by some local builders. There’s a bunch of other really great galleries and project spaces in the area, like Arcadia Missa in Peckham, Plaza Plaza in Elephant and Castle, and more recently Jupiter Woods in South Ber-mondsey that have been art outposts that I always love to go to and catch up with friends at, and often see great new work. Its hard to generalise about a scene, but its definitely the place I feel best in London. It’s not too uptight and there’s some great things like the giant Surrey Quays mall that remind me a little bit of home in North Amer-ica. There’s a 24 hour supermarket and a cinema and a casino. Sometimes we

go at night and raid the dumpsters of the sporting good superstore for dis-carded display stands and corrugated plastic posters. One of those that was an advert for £10 trainers ended up as a screen surface in my SEO and Co. show. That great contemporary capi-talist no-place is a constant subject of inspiration for me.

Studioscape: Intentions, themes, techniques, new pieces?

Everyday I’m still exploring the Post-post-post production series. There’s so many variables in the materials, leading to new results that I’m push-ing to achieve and discover. I’m also currently working on a new series of sculptures that involves compression artefacts, a 3D router and extruded plastic, which will be for two shows in the fall. I’m doing early stage work on a major outdoor/public work which will be presented in January as part of larg-er event. A free, downloadable library of my text works, originally posted on Twitter, is now available as vector files in my handwriting, ready to be laser cut in vinyl or other materials. A col-laborative performance that will take place during Art Basel. And the New Abject eBook…

MOSCOW INTERNATIONAL BIENNALE FOR YOUNG ART 2016

The Moscow International Biennale for Young Art in 2016 is a grand showcasing for emerging artists less than 35 years of age. Curated by British Nadim Samman, the exhibition seeks to analyse fresh social issues such as the environmental crisis, conspiracies, encryptions, and the Internet.

As Kneale is interested in the notion of Post-Internet artwork and the evolution of abject conceptualisation in contemporary art, he was particularly suited to feature in that year’s Biennale. Indeed, for his contribution Kneale took as a point of departure a short story of ‘artist-fiction’ he wrote for Frieze Projects. He then combined the material textures of Las Vegas’ urban sprawl with the uniformity of digital spaces to create a series of power-ful installations. In these works, Kneale highlights the similarities between the virtual metaverse and the physical spaces of the city.

Using materials such as plastic, aluminium, wood, and fencing, the artist continues his investigation of the ‘new abject’ by rec-reating the spirit of the digital image-world with commonplace, every-day objects

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1986 Canada

2009-2011 Master of Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK2004-2009 Bachelor of Arts Honours, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

2012-2013 Zurich University of Art, Media Art Department, Zurich, Switzerland

2019 Crossing the borders of photography, Somerset House, London, UK2018 Peindre la nuit, Centre Pompidou, Metz, France Memories Arrested in Space, Italian Cultural Institute, London, UK Compression, Artuner, Brussels, Belgium (solo)2017 Image Ageless, Boca Raton Museum, Boca Raton, USA (solo) Command-Alternative-Escape, Arsenale Novissimo, Venice, Italy After Image, with Toby Ziegler, Artuner, New York, USA Painting or not, Kaviar Factory, Norway2016 High Anxiety, The Rubell Family Museum, Miami, USA Project 1049, Gstaad, Switzerland Moscow Biennale, Moscow, Russia Soho Review ‘Whats Up’, London UK2015 Palazzo Capris, Turin, Italy Free Software, Import Gallery, Berlin, Germany (solo) Spotlight, Artuner, London, UK (solo) New Abject Launch, David Roberts Art Foundation, London, UK Lunch Bytes, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin, Germany Abjects, Import Projects, Berlin, Germany SALTS, WLGTDWI, Basel, Switzerland Art Basel, Conversations, Basel, Switzerland 4 or 5 self portraits for free-form natural language descriptions of image regions, Evelyn Yard Gallery, London, UK NADA NYC, New York, USA Paramount Ranch, Los Angeles, USA2014 Pleasure Principles, Lafayette Anticipations, Fondation Galeries Lafayettes, Paris, France Digital Cultures, ICA, London, UK SEO and Co., Tank TV Gallery, London, UK Monet’s Garden, Zuckerberg’s Firewall, AND/OR Gallery, London, UK /b/Random, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada 2013 V22 Gallery, London, UK LIMA ZULU Gallery, London, UK Poetry and Dream, Plaza Plaza Gallery, London, UK Library+, Institute Bianche, London, UK2012 Recreational Date, Frieze Projects, London, UK2011 Auto Italia, Counter Constructs, London, UK

Paul Kneale

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education

teaching

exhibitions

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