Dirk Knibbe

Snakes Have No Legs

New Low is pleased to present Snakes Have No Legs, an exhibition by Dirk Knibbe. 

Despite working across a myriad of media, Dirk Knibbe’s seems modular. Especially when visiting the studio, one can’t help but make absurd combinations and compositions from all the images and objects around. I think of Charlotte Posenenske - build your own work. Play is important and allows for new constructions: sometimes better, sometimes worse, but always different, and always Dirk. 

Walking the line between critical thinker and conspiracy theorist, in Snakes Have No Legs, Knibbe presents an exhibition as junk drawer. There’s a lot of useful, recognisable objects, or elements of objects, recontextualized to become shadow casting shape and silhouette.There are stacks and piles reminiscent of stores that are disappearing in Los Angeles (Star World, Movie World / Castle of Books to name a couple). Dust is implied, but not present. 

There’s something about exhaustion here - the weight of capitalism and all its stuff - or exhausting ideas, trying everything out to see if it fits, only to find that nothing works, besides us, always - on the job, in the studio, on ourselves. And maybe, this work presents exhibition as coping mechanism for this imposed condition.

To quote Knibbe, Snakes Have No Legs is a “mid career-less retrospective acknowledging a sequence of styles of work and their reference and material starting point.” So we welcome you to New Low as trip into Knibbe’s mind map/charity shop/material dump. For this presentation, the artist has even chosen to resurface the store front of New Low’s facade with a cool pink California stucco.

Dirk Knibbe is a day labourer in the image industries at the end of the western myth. He went to SAIC in Chicago and Art Center in Pasadena. He used to run Black Tent Press. He has recently exhibited with Gattopardo at Frieze & NADA. Snakes Have No Legs is a work site performance of sculpture and photographs that shows the backend on wondering what our life cycle's relationship to the free energy model is.