M.L. Knight’s collages are full of cheery colours, fuzz, sparkles, and the sort of rudimentary human figures you see in first-graders’ family portraits, but there’s usually something older and darker in the background. In “Ghost House Moderne,” smiling little girls in tutus are trapped inside clear molded plastic. And “trapped” also happens to be the last word in the list of adjectives Knight puts beneath a series of cutout cherubs (“Silhouette Tots”). Look over the titles of the works and you keep seeing words like “anxious,” “troubled,” “worried,” “suspicious.” “I’m always unnerved, as a person,” says Knight.
Take “Little Forms of Safety,” which comes across at first as purely tongue-in-cheek. Knight made the piece shortly after her husband’s death, when, she says, “I felt as if I would never be safe again.” It’s a poker-faced nod to the many foolish things people spend so much time and money warding off—there’s a knife that won’t brown lettuce, see-thru furniture covers, and “year-round patriotic lights.” Then there’s “Arms and the Man,” which features George W. Bush in a paper-doll incarnation, surrounded by tiny exhortations not to cut out the space between arms and body.
But it’s not meant to be a downer. “I could no more make a tragic picture,” Knight says, “than fly to the moon.” And plenty of pieces are just funny. “Learning the Computer” (the Dell logo disassembled into contorted blue figures, character strings dribbling everywhere) summons up all the times your grandmother called to find out how to check her e-mail. And “Sunday School (1925): Open House for Biblical Characters” has bearded patriarchs frowning wonderingly at flappers and their short-pantsed children, and vice versa.
The show also includes sculptures by M.L. Knight’s son, Henry, who’s actually a poet. These too are cheerily benign at first glance—adorable tiny round people in tableau. Look closer, though, and they’re full of black comedy. One series illustrates Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” in which a family falls afoul of a serial killer. “Cesar assassine” is Shakespeare by way of YTV (aww, look at the little Brutus!). Henry Knight explains it’s to be expected. His sculptures are made of Fimo. “It’s a children’s medium. No one takes it very seriously…so I myself can be very unironic.” Enter his pieces on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from a fundamentalist perspective: imagine the poem was “a literal record of miraculous events.” There’s the scuttling pair of claws, the life measured out in teaspoons. “He’s having a very bad day,” Knight says, perhaps unnecessarily. The show is on display in Northrop Frye Hall until Mar. 28.
