The world, it seems, now really wants to believe. Look toward the skies: that ball of light could be, at last, Visitors. Or it could just be us, converting anything in front of us—be it sky, land, light—into a mirror. [...]
At Andrew Edlin Gallery downtown, Karla Knight’s funky, colorful paintings have a humane spark that aligns them within and against the moment. They are intricately rendered to resemble odd sorts of objects, here a pulsingly red motherboard with Knight’s familiar orange orbs built into it, there an ocean-blue tapestry dotted with ciphers and planets. Her busy canvas Watching for the Planets (2025) slows the eye down while pulling it into its orbit, offering relief from a smartphone world training our eyes to manically scan. Approach the edge of her canvases, and you’ll find phrases like ASTRONOMY FOR EVERYBODY, PLANET—ANY WORLD THAT MOVES, and alluring kennings like SPACE BREAD and the oddly ubiquitous SHY TEETH. That befuddling last phrase gives away Knight’s concern: human language and its chattering inability to cope with what it can’t pronounce. Accordingly, other swaths of her canvases are painted in a language of her own making. How to communicate with the big Other? A blank is drawn. The craze chez Knight points, if anything, to the limits of human perception.
- Carlos Valladares