On the Cover: Kelly Knight

Assemblage is art made by assembling disparate elements, often everyday objects. Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, and other ephemera are arranged and adhered to a surface. Automatism refers to creating art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process. When all three are used in tandem it often results in a multi-layered, highly personal work of art, as the artist is not attempting to replicate a perceivable reality, yet create a new reality by pairing and layering image and object to unlock and illustrate the visions in their mind. Data in, data out.

“It’s definitely intuitive. It’s definitely feeding back stuff I’m absorbing. Like music, I cannot work without music,” says this month’s cover artist Kelly Knight. “I try to limit what I’m consuming from the world when I know I’ll be working in the studio. It’s really a journey for me… Often I’ll get midway through a piece and be really in the zone with it and then I’ll start getting imagery in my head of where it needs to go. That’s when I start pulling in tools like AI or sourcing images from other places.”

This month’s cover art is a hand-assembled piece constructed of cutup cyanotype prints, architectural drawings, photographs taken by Knight, assorted paper and ephemera from Knight’s studio, and AI-generated images constructed from Knight’s text prompts and sourced from her photography.

“I fed the image of one of [my assemblages] into the AI generator and the prompt I used was: three birds hold time, which was the title of the piece. It gave me all these interesting variations. I printed off different variations and cut them up and used some of that imagery in this piece. It’s super multi-layered. In the bottom right there’s a photo of an old barn I took when I was up in Rangeley, Maine, like 10 years ago. I fed that into the AI generator and gave it a title, and it gave me this really interesting printed text over the barn door, which I thought was so cool. You can’t read it, which I love in that way where it’s sort of indecipherable. When I write on my work, I try to achieve the same thing. It was cool that AI did that.”

To the left of the AI generated barn door is a black and white image of a cityscape, another AI-generated image this time created using one of Knight’s text prompts.

“The prompt I gave it was something like, walking in the footsteps of my ancestors in New York. In the 1800s my ancestors immigrated from Ireland and they were in New York for a time. I visited some of those neighborhoods in lower Manhattan where I knew they lived and then generated this.”

Buildings, structures, and architectural elements are a recurring theme in Knight’s work, notably present in her 2023 body of work Ulterior Spaces (AS220, March 2023).

“I’m interested in the aesthetics of place. More importantly, the feeling of a place. I especially love buildings with a lot of history and buildings where you can feel something. I have a lot of recurring dreams about experiences in buildings, and I think that’s part of the psyche. On some level I’m interested in the notion that there are multiple layers of reality that could be happening all the time. I feel like buildings are vessels for that. I’ve lived in a lot of old buildings and old places where I’ve had strange experiences, and I feel some of that is stored energy or vibrations or history that keeps replaying. The structures represent many things – security, safety, there’s a lot there.”

The image of the woman with the bird on her head is also AI generated, an image Knight describes as “borderline too perfect,” preferring instead the distorted, disfigured imagery earlier versions of AI routinely produced.

“It’s mind boggling how quickly the technology has advanced. When I first started using it, I was getting more interesting imagery, it was uncanny, it was fuzzy, it was hard to get humans to look like humans. Now it’s advanced so quickly I can’t get that weird, uncanny look anymore. Everything is too polished and perfect.”

Ulterior Spaces, the show held earlier this year at AS220, incorporated many black and white images of Victorian-era girls, images which came from Knight feeding the AI generator Emily Dickinson prompts, such as, Emily Dickinson wants to be a spirit. Knight played around with different phrases and the generator produced the weird, fuzzy, unpolished imagery she prefers.

“It’s strange, it’s almost like the more advanced it gets, the more it’s trying to, and this is gonna sound weird, but it seems like it’s trying to please you. Whereas before it was just generating stuff based on prompts, it didn’t feel like it was trying. Now it feels like it’s trying.”

Encircling the “borderline too perfect” woman’s head is a halo of Knight’s signature cryptic text, a process Knight describes as a way of intentionally conveying thoughts and ideas, in addition to adding compositional elements. The text is broken up, non-linear, confidently childish. To achieve the look, Knight turns the page upside down and skips around when writing sentences. The text is deliberately cryptic to avoid spoon-feeding her perspective to the viewer. She prefers instead to have viewers find their own way through by giving them just a sense of her thoughts and enough room to interpret.

“Sometimes I like to use the letters as marks, as part of the composition. Other times I’m conveying my thoughts as I work on the piece; sometimes I’m injecting prayer. Prayer is a word that comes up, although I am not religious. I have a spiritual practice, but not in the sort of traditional, Christian sense of prayer, more in a setting of intention.”

On either side of the woman’s head are cyanotype prints Knight’s turned into structures with roofs and windows, and then painted over. The bottommost layer is an old, hand-rendered architectural drawing of a building in Boston where she used to live. Below the woman is a photo of a building that Knight took while visiting New York. There are packing materials, staples, and painted details. Knight describes herself as “rooted in the tactile.” Over the past few years, she’s gotten into collage art, and when she struggled to find imagery that was right for the piece, she turned to AI.

“When I became aware of AI platforms like DALL-E, I started exploring it as a way to generate some of what I have in my mind, and that was only after sourcing from print material… It feels like a cool way to merge language with visual work. But I get antsy and I miss the actual physical process of creating; I’ll never be a person who could just create on the computer.”

A lot of artists are concerned about AI image generators appropriating their imagery, replicating their style, and ultimately, replacing them as artists. Although Knight worries about this for other artists, in particular artists working in certain industries such as gaming and marketing, it’s not something she worries about personally.

“What I realized from my own work is that people are interested in your work because of what you bring to it, not just the work you produce, but the story behind it and who you are as a person. Even if an AI generator could duplicate what I’m doing or excel at what I’m doing it still would have that sort of emptiness. There’s a hollowness to it. As long as humans are interested in other humans, I don’t worry about it replacing us as artists… Art connects humanity to humanity, it connects us to each other. As soon as you have a computer taking the place of a person in that realm, it’s no longer art in a way, it’s not doing its job anymore. It loses an element of curiosity. If you have a computer that could just churn stuff out endlessly, who cares?”

To view more work by Kelly Knight, visit kellyaknight.com or follow her on Instagram @kellyaknight.