MEXICO CITY.- kurimanzutto is part of CONDO Mexico City, a collaborative exhibition by 49 galleries across 22 Mexico City spaces, hosting an exhibition by White Columns gallery, New York.

White Columns presents work by Dale Jackson and Christopher Knowles, alongside a new t-shirt project by Kim Gordon / Design Office at kurimanzutto as a part of the inaugural CONDO Mexico City.

Christopher Knowles presents a group of his ‘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’ and at kurimanzutto libros bookstore.)

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.

Dale Jackson is showing an installation of works on paper that 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 storytelling 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. He 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.

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