Press Release

 

Daphne Knouse

Will Turn

 

Tutu Gallery

September 21 - October 26, 2024

 

 

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A pair of glasses, a dandelion and a worm walk into a bar, to be greeted by a ransom note who sticks his fingers into daycare paint. 

 

Caterpillars are like babies looking older than butterflies.

 

The faucet goes plop plop plop and the wind howls silently across the tundra where one day elves used to work painting eggs and now the wyrms burrow down through the snow to get to the yummy yummy dirt deep below.

 

 

 

 

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I scroll down with them, zooming in and in on my phone. All the while the paint from his fingers drips into my coffee cup. I look down, bemused, to see little inky wisps who aren’t looking back.

 

I’ve known Daphne for a long time and I know how she likes to paint. She tends to her work like a garden with the stone-faced monotone of a polish babushka. Maybe a better way to describe it is like a screen-age child moving the icons around on the family desktop to try and build a house, making up stories about each application. Really though in practice it’s a lot more like a single dad trying to feed Spaghetti-o’s to his nonverbal son, sauce everywhere. Daphne likes the little things.

 

Tutu Gallery announces Daphne Knouse’s third exhibition with the space, Will Turn, opening September 21 through October 26, 2024. Employing a strategy of object tableau, Knouse’s newest body of work eschews the rendered subject in favor of gestural mark-making, and these marks are treated with the same weight as the overt symbols– they are both treated seriously as objects within the picture plane. The language is looser and privileges a lexicon of semiotic signifiers that are more icon than figure. The blops and squiggles have personalities and characters, and their characterization itself blurs the line between purpose and happy accident. Within the confines of the image all marks– vitalistic gestures, discernable renderings, found objects and incidental splatterings alike become objects as displayed on a screen. 
 

These images reflect the way that the romantic notion of the painting as a window into a rich inner world has been recontextualized in the era of pocket pictures and virtual worlds, but rather than being dumb and painting 

like a videogame, these works are dumb in the way that a baby is dumb, utilizing a childlike characterization of nooks and crannies and finding faces in the clouds and the grout. They are not world building. What’s happening here is more like world-finding, zooming in and searching out the little personalities of bugs and faucet heads and little bits of fluff. When you dig down deep enough you find that all these little guys share a hive mind. 

 

09.03.2024

Ada Wickens

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gorillas, Leprechauns, Santas, and now Worms 

 

What can you expect from Daphne Knouse’s newest project? Well, for one thing, there are worms in almost every painting… I’ve had the privilege of seeing the paintings early so that I could write this, and now all I’m going to do is tell you what that experience was like for me, rather than trying to tell you what might’ve motivated her choice to paint worms, or trying to explain the theory behind them, which, if I’m being honest, she has tried to explain to me on a couple occasions, but whenever this happens it doesn’t take long before the words start flying over my head and I just start nodding soberly while trying to think of a polite way to tell her that I understood literally zilch of what you just said and could you please speak English?

 

Daphne’s signature idiosyncratic doodle-like style is on full display in this new fully realized world she’s happened to stumble upon over the course of her ongoing investigation of the place where all the images and characters she’s rendered for us were born. While taking a concentrated look at smaller things, while examining moods others might let pass, Daphne has managed to create scenes that at once feel close up, intimate, and inviting, and somehow true to size. And though there is something inherently jarring about the work, something about the way certain elements collide, something about the phantom-like coolness that I’ve grown to associate with Daphne’s paintings, I believe it is these certain qualities that help the paintings break through to the viewer, rouse the viewer, and politely usher them into full lucidity. Let the images wash over you like a mantra. In this tiny world there are overtones of much larger ideas. They could be your own. That is what's cool about art like this. Nothing but love. 

 

09.17.24

Joseph Jacquez

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Daphne Knouse is an artist raised and based in New York City. Her first solo presentation marked Tutu Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, in July 2019. Since then she has studied at and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA degree. Her work has been shown at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; Marlow & Daughters, Brooklyn, NY, and more.

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For inquiries contact April: tutugallery.meow@gmail.com

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