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03.16.24

Opening Tonight at 5pm: John Ward Knox - Walk on Waking. fb.me/e/1HH9S8AJDThis exhibition started in the dirt, in spring. The daffodils were already through—bright yellow bugles sounding reveille to the seeds and tubers still dormant in the earth. Deciduous trees were beginning to clothe themselves again, first in a sheer green shimmer over their winter-dark bones and then, all in a hurry, in blotches and patches and fingertip flourishes. Every tree dresses itself differently; some dowdily primp the ruffles of their winter coat back to newness while others, such as the magnolia, dress first in jewellery and stand naked against the mirror of the sky, before condescending to convention. Everywhere new life was emerging and I wished to create a celebration of that vegetal flush of optimism, sugars and starches stored in seed and root showing us the new tilt of the earth’s axis. I wanted to recognise the tiny forces at work everywhere, pushing and pulling in relation to the constants at the core of it all: the gravitation of our iron heart and the levity of our ambition. Each day during the making of this show I would walk in the nearby hills, along metal and dirt roads, under the keen watch of kāhu and the inky, still gaze of cattle. The roads pass wetlands, rail corridors, farmland, macrocarpa plantations, gorse-filled gullies, bare outcroppings of rock, a few country houses with fruit trees, concrete culverts and views of the soft curve of the horizon. All around me green things were burying their pale roots into the earth and this was going to be the name and content of the show: Roadside Growth. I wanted to witness how these marginal plants flourished. I had an idea of the gallery as an industrial yard—a space reserved for the exceptionally hardy and the exceptionally delicate, for rarified and transmissible ideas. I wanted to show off the spectacular tenacity and sculptural ingenuity of these plants—the ways they grow in, and interact with, a world that is hardened to them. This was to be a sculptural celebration of form and diversity, of geometry, of physics—a series of tiny, unexceptional guides to the universe. But then, something shifted. The heavy tread of humanity is felt as much in the earth as the roots of these plants. The show changed, because the violence of our species is too loud to ignore, and gained a new name: Walk on Waking. ...
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