Chelsea Knight Awarded New Museum Residency

Chelsea Knight has been awarded a residency as part of the New Museum’s Spring 2015 Research and Development season, SPECULATION. The theme of speculation is being considered for, among other things, “its volatile relationship to faith and evocation of diverse possibilities for speculative futures, including alternative economies that focus on caregiving, collective labor, and new modes of distribution.”

For her residency, Knight will produce the final chapters of Fall to Earth, a cycle of short videos inspired by Salman Rushdie’s magical realist novel, The Satanic Verses. Of Fall to Earth, she writes, “this project investigates the threshold between belief and doubt. It is a look at censorship through the lens of blasphemous or socially condemned speech in comparison to a believer’s religious or ecstatic speech.”

Chelsea Knight and Houston based artist Autumn Knight will also present Knight + Knight: Latencies, a performance that is part lecture, part dinner party, and part therapy session in which two female artists who share the same last name examine their symmetries and, in the process, some fundamentals around feminism and race. Knight + Knight: Latencies debuted at DiverseWorks in January, 2015.

Knight will be in residence at the New Museum through September, 2015.

About R&D, from the New Museum’s website:

“The New Museum’s Department of Education and Public Engagement introduced R&D Seasons in the fall of 2013. The seasonal approach allows artists and audiences to engage through research-based speculations around objects, ideas, and artistic practices across multiple platforms. Framing artist residencies, exhibitions, live performances, conferences, screenings, online publications, after-school programs for teens, family day activities, and archival research by way of topical questions, Seasons occur twice each year and are divided into Fall and Spring periods. Each Season, in turn, is organized around a central theme, connecting various projects in the Museum’s galleries, Theater, and Resource Center within a larger context that emphasizes process and emerging ideas through the strategy of “Research and Development.” Anchoring the New Museum’s dedication to expanded forms of knowledge and cultural production, Seasonal themes are wide-ranging and limber, rather than illustrative, and the artists, scholars, and curators whose work is examined test the limits of the themes themselves.”