White Columns at Kurimanzutto
CONDO Mexico City

Dale Jackson will present an installation of works on paper.  Jackson is an artist affiliated with Visionaries + Voices, a Cincinnati, OH studio program and gallery that supports a community of artists living and working with developmental disabilities.

Jackson’s work takes the form of large-scale text drawings made with markers on colored sheets of poster board. Each work consists of a sequence of consecutive sheets (ranging between ten and fourteen individual drawings) that together form open-ended, and free-associative narratives. The texts draw from Jackson’s own biography, including references to specific locales and neighborhoods in his native Cincinnati, his quotidian daily routines (Dale works at a local Kroger supermarket), as well as illuminating his preoccupying interests in cars, travel, and popular music (and in particular the music of Motown and The Beatles.)

Typically completed in a single sitting, Jackson’s sequential drawings present a fragmentary, staccato-like form of story-telling where aspects of his daily life intersect with remembered scenes from movies and television shows or song lyrics. Despite being created as sequential works (e.g. each successive sheet in a multi-part work is identified as ‘Page 1’, ‘Page 2’, etc.) the individual drawings invariably close with the words ‘The End’, suggesting that each ‘text’ might be considered as an autonomous statement.

Over the past few years Jackson has produced hundreds of such drawings and seen together they provide us with a vivid account of his life and the things that inspire him, in turn creating a ‘portrait’ – of sorts – of the artist. Filled with humor, humanity and pathos, Jackson’s work – despite its biographical specificity – ultimately speaks to something larger, more fundamental and perhaps even universal.

Dale Jackson lives and works in Cincinnati, OH. His work was the subject of a solo exhibition at White Columns in 2016. His work has also been included in exhibitions at Visionaries + Voices, Cincinnati; Thunder-Sky Inc., Cincinnati; Rob Tufnell, London; and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.

White Columns would like to thank everyone at Visionaries + Voices for their assistance and enthusiasm about presenting Jackson’s work for the first time in Mexico. To learn more about Visionaries and Voices, visit: www.visionariesandvoices.com

Christopher Knowles will present a group of his signature ‘typing’ works alongside an audio recording of him reading his poetry. (Knowles was recorded live at Gavin Brown’s New York gallery in 2015. The recording is available to purchase as a vinyl record on White Columns’ record label ‘The Sound of White Columns’.)
Writing about Knowles’ work, White Columns’ director Matthew Higgs said: I first encountered Christopher Knowles’ work in the late 1980s via his artist’s book Typings (Vehicle Editions, New York, 1979) and his contributions to the legendary 1978 ‘Schizo-Culture’ issue of the seminal anti-journal Semiotext(e): where his work was framed alongside that of Jack Smith, Jimmy De Sana, Andre Cadere, The Ramones, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, John Giorno, and Robert Wilson amongst others.
Contracting a rare blood disease in utero, Knowles was born in 1959 with some neurological damage. As a child, he independently developed a complex relationship with both written and spoken language, which took the form of texts, drawings and sound recordings.  In 1973, at age fourteen, Knowles met the experimental theatre director Robert Wilson who had been introduced to Knowles’ sound recordings by the Knowles family friend George Klauber. This meeting would set in motion a collaborative dialog between Knowles and Wilson that persists to this day. In 1989, Robert Wilson observed that “Everything Christopher Knowles does makes sense but not in the way we are accustomed to.”
In 1978 John Ashbery, writing in New York Magazine, suggested that “Christopher [Knowles] seems to be providing the world with a much needed object lesson: that it is possible, in art, to be both careless and rigorous at the same time.” Working intuitively, Knowles’ works – ‘typings’, drawings, paintings, sculptures, performances, and sound recordings – take the form of an ongoing investigation into the possibilities and potential of language (both spoken and written), narrative, (auto)biography, spatial order, temporal precision and repetition.
Christopher Knowles (b. 1959) lives and works in New York. The first museum survey of his work ‘In A Word’ – curated by Anthony Elms and Hilton Als, and organized by the Philadelphia ICA – is currently on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Knowles’ first monograph In A Word was published in 2018 by Gregory R. Miller & Co., New York.
Christopher Knowles’ solo exhibitions include: Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York (2015, 2013, 2004); Office Baroque, Brussels (2016); Fonoteca Nacional de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico (cur. By Agustin Perez Rubio, 2015); Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna (with Karl Holmqvist, 2009); Galerie Dorrie & Priess, Hamburg (1988); Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1985); and Holly Solomon Gallery, New York (1979, and 1978), among others. Knowles’ extensive collaborations with Robert Wilson – as both performer and co-author – include: ‘The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin’ (1973); ‘A Letter For Queen Victoria’ (1974); ‘Einstein On The Beach’ (1976); and ‘Parzival’ (1987), among many others.
We would like to acknowledge Gavin Brown and Emily Bates for their generous assistance with the presentation of Christopher Knowles’ work at Kurimanzutto.

Kim Gordon / Design Office

Kim Gordon is an artist, writer, performer and musician, and a founding member of the group Sonic Youth. Gordon’s first solo exhibition – presented under the name ‘Design Office’ – took place at White Columns in 1981. In 2013, White Columns organized a four-decade survey of her work as a visual artist. Over the past five years Kim Gordon / Design Office has created t-shirts for White Columns based on a 2011 painting by Gordon of the gallery’s name (White Columns, 2011.) For CONDO Mexico City a new, specially commissioned Design Office / White Columns-Mexico t-shirt will be available from the gallery.
Kim Gordon currently has a solo exhibition at House of Gaga / Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Los Angeles.
White Columns would like to thank Kim Gordon for her enthusiasm for this project.

For more information:
CONDO Mexico City www.condocomplex.org
KURIMANZUTTO www.kurimanzutto.com