Roland Knowlden: Black Tributary

September 14 - October 19, 2024

Opening Reception Saturday, September 14, 2024, 6 - 9pm

Roland Knowlden is a Liberian American interdisciplinary artist and architectural designer from New Jersey, currently based in Chicago, IL. Knowlden’s architectural background has cultivated his ongoing interest in constructed landscapes, and the cultural and social implications of rendering space, either as landscape or map. Working across painting and collage, Knowlden’s abstract cityscapes articulate the tensions wrought by erasure, displacement, and palimpsest within new imagined geographies. 

Interrogating notions of origin, belonging, boundaries, and power, Knowlden’s critical cartography aims to not only reproduce existing environmental experiences and affects, but to propose new spatial realities. With each new configuration and composition, Knowlden furthers his practice of imagining otherwise.