Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present Orbit, our fourth solo exhibition for Karla Knight.
There is something uniquely human about the desire to make sense of the world. We learn almost from birth that symbols stand in for something else, letters form words, and words come together to convey meaning. It’s unsurprising, then, that when looking at the clear signs and symbols in abstract art by figures like Hilma af Klint, viewers become convinced that hidden messages await.
Karla Knight’s art evokes a sense that the shapes, signs, letters, and glyphs embedded in her paintings, drawings, and tapestries contain a hidden structure or language. They are rendered with clarity: neatly ordered arrangements like a code or relic from an archaeological dig conducted somewhere between the future and the distant past. The works’ surfaces bear what has become Knight’s signature lexicon: floating otherworldly orbs, diagrammatic constellations, and a script of characters that appear simultaneously insistently meaningful and stubbornly opaque.
Over the years, Knight’s commitment to her invented language seems only to have grown and evolved as new characters emerge and symbols proliferate. Orbit contains works filled with rows and columns of symbols, like Feelers (2025-26) and examples from the Blue Libra series. In Unusual Stars (2025-26), Knight has included lists of nonsensical words and spaceship-like objects that seem to be sending a signal in black and gold orbs. Suggestions of science also appear, but her science seems to be one based on loose facts, more of a personal and playful interpretation—she even titled a work Fun with Science (2025-26). Yet all of Knight’s characters are precisely that, playful inventions loosely based on reality.
Orbit includes a laboratory-like room offering a glimpse into her mind with objects like rocks and books, as well as drawings and studies for her paintings. Knight was raised in a household attuned to the occult and the paranormal—her father wrote about UFOs and the afterlife—Knight absorbed early on the notion that unseen forces might shape reality as much as visible ones.
And yet, despite any hinted meaning, Knight’s work does not distinguish between the empirical and the mystical. Diagrams resemble charts, but their logic remains elusive; symbols suggest language but refuse to resolve into meaning. The result is a kind of epistemological suspension, in which the viewer is invited to inhabit uncertainty rather than overcome it. In an art world often preoccupied with legibility—political, theoretical, or otherwise—Knight’s work insists on the value of the unknowable.
Karla Knight’s work has been exhibited widely, most recently at Once Within a Time, 12th International at SITE Santa Fe, curated by Cecilia Alemani (2025-26), and Transe at Gomide & Co., São Paulo. Her solo exhibition, Navigator, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT) in 2021-22 was accompanied by a monograph written by Amy Smith-Stewart, and a second edition was published in 2023 with an essay by Cassie Packard. Her art is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis). She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, among them, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo Corporation, and two Connecticut Artist Fellowships.