Devon McKnight

Artist Statement

As a disabled, queer artist from the rural South, landscape, specifically this landscape, is embedded in how I engage with the world. I am consumed with how the disabled body relates to its environment; the people and structures, the land; the awkward/clumsy/beautiful/ugly failures that are survival. My art practice comes out of a history of formality, specifically within Painting, and the desire to break apart or unmap the formation of our dysfunctional systems.

When working, I question what makes up a painting: how it is formed, what it can be, what it can mean, where it comes from. I consider the formal in its most basic existence, separating line, color, shape. Using these elements I arrange and rearrange, coming upon more questions within these fragile relationships. There is a lot of looking that takes place. After putting down paint, I sit and look, trying to see the forms and spaces that have been shaped and those that could be. I try to stay in this liminal space of transience. It is a place of wonder and precarity, lines and forms falling apart and together, barely stable. We aren't sure, but we can relate.

To not know, to be unsecure in meaning, draws out openness and a welcoming of fear and doubt. There is value in the pursuit and in the mere existence. There is energy in the endless exploration that transfers to and draws from everyday life and I hope enters the lives of those that encounter this work.

These paintings honor the fragilities of existing and perhaps offer that it is here, in these small in-betweens, in that which is overlooked that we may find what we are looking for.