KLEMM’S
My Ecstasy is Your Rapture, 2019
This visual essay combines footage from a series of musical performances, both private and public, rehearsed and impromptu. The work reflects on the commingled manipulation and seduction of any musical form, with sonic abstraction as a productive and affective type of language. Through the use of screens within the video, including Knight’s use of a smartphone to film the project, the piece talks about social and cultural distances and allowances (what are we allowed to record and in what circumstances) and builds a spectrum of queer pleasure, the erotic, the nature of binaries, cultural underbellies, transgression, and ultimately the sociology of any intimate space.
Teachers College, Columbia University, 2019
This video is comprised of interviews with employees of Teachers College at Columbia University. The participants, speaking anecdotally about their work and lives, also describe and interpret historical photographs taken over more than a century in various learning environments in the school. The interviews are counterpointed by slow, wandering footage of the interior spaces of the institution. This work investigates institutional spaces and the voices of those who make these spaces function.
When the Moon is Full, 2007
This video, made in 2007, when Knight was in graduate school, documents Knight’s relationship with her divorced grandparents. The work explores connection, isolation and aging within a family structure, and points to our lived experience inside and beyond bonds of kinship.
Chelsea Knight is a video artist working in New York and Vermont. Solo exhibitions and performances include: The New Museum (NY), The St. Louis Art Museum (MO); The Brooklyn Museum; Aspect Ratio Gallery (Chicago); Momenta Art (Brooklyn) and DiverseWorks (Houston). Knight was a 2009 participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program, a 2015 Artist in Residence at the New Museum (NYC) and a 2018 resident at the MacDowell Colony (New Hampshire). She is currently Visiting Faculty at Bennington College, in Vermont.
