Locatoin: McKnight Art Center West, Clayton Staples Gallery

"The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning"
Featuring original work by Joshua James Knott

Gallery hours
Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. 

From the artist
Art and life happen in fragments. I feel the creative act is an attempt to reconfigure those fragments. My studio practice is reliant on the act of collecting and accumulating an eclectic range of image resources. I modify and combine these appropriated fragments with my own drawings, collages, photographs, and other image-centric ephemera. This combination of personal mark-making and manipulated/appropriated source materials exemplifies a number of dualities, philosophically linked by their opposition, such as the abstract and the concrete, the digital and the analogue, the visceral and the ethereal, destruction and creation, chaos and order, and the sacred and the profane.

The interplay of these contradictions is echoed throughout my work in various motifs and thematic variations, encouraging the viewer to make conceptual leaps between disparate works and generate individual connections. By balancing between and working through these qualities, my work speaks to an ongoing struggle to retain some vestige of hope while also acknowledging the vulnerability of the human condition.

About the artist
Knott holds a BFA in graphic design from Fort Hays State University; MFA from Tulane University; and an MFA in digital art and printmaking from Fort Hays State University. He is currently lead art instructor at Crowder College in Missouri.  

Exhibition-related events
Exhibition-related events are free and open to the public.

Artist Talk
4 p.m. on Thursday, March 12 in McKnight Art Center West, Room 210

Meet the Artist Reception
5 p.m. on Thursday, March 12 in McKnight Art Center West, Clayton Staples Gallery