His images are sometimes beautiful, sometimes stomach-churning, and occasionally too much like microscope slides from high school biology. In “Hair Strand,’’ for instance, Knep put a hair from his own head among the worms and watched them gather around it. Looking at pieces such as this, I had trouble making the aesthetic leap out of the lab and into the gallery.
“Encounter,’’ a digital print, features several images of a female form that Knep borrowed from the pictures of a man and woman emblazoned on the side of the Pioneer space capsule launched into deep space in the early 1970s. A worm approaches the woman’s head and caresses her face. Really? I don’t doubt that it happened, but surely the worm did not ascribe the same meaning to it that we do.
The beauty can seem forced: Many of these works have an amber glow, and Knep imposes forms, such as a labyrinth, that are compelling, if only because they add order to a lump of squirming worms. The labyrinth appears in a print and the video “Labyrinthine Meditation: Middle Stage,’’ and in both, countless worms crawl, sometimes through their own muck, through the labyrinth toward the clean center, where a single worm is curled.
Does the worm want to be alone? This seems more probable than a worm showing affection to a picture of a woman. Questions like this, rather than the images themselves, make some of Knep’s work worth wrestling with. Are we all, in some way, just worms making our way blindly through mazes? I’d ask myself a similar question watching a documentary about ants. In the end, Knep’s work looks more like that of a nature documentarian than that of an artist.
Projections
