The Great Game of Power

Salma Sarriedine is pleased to present The Great Game of Power, a two-person show featuring artists: Miguel Colón and Savannah Knoop. There are interstices in the world, in the humdrum of ordinary life, places where fingers of possibility multiply and flex, reach out and inhabit new architecture. Strings are plucked, bodies in space become synoptic nerves sending signals that echo out into the world. The show The Great Game of Power is one such a place, in which two artists Miguel Colón and Savannah Knoop interlace observation and action amid spatial structures of power. In Augusto Boal's radical theatre exercise The Great Game of Power, chairs and a bottle of water are arranged and rearranged to explore hierarchies of power and perception. This Is a Game. Boal believed a game is a call to action, in which "all must act, all must be protagonists in the necessary transformations of society." Here is a way to oscillate between high stakes while being low-risk. In play, finite bodies exist, search for mediated answers or solace, exercise a deep subjectivity. There is still a place for the heart-felt and for the hand-made. A portrait is a person. Colón's paintings of figures and self-portraits seek incarnation, to prove their flesh, their very existence, despite the labyrinthine slate grey walls of an anonymous institution within the surveillance state. Eerie lavenders and pinks seep from the corners. The otherworldly glow of the cell phone has been gritted with sand. In these cages, sinew is compressed and taut, mid-torque. The figure is burdened like Atlas but the labour is that of a Sibyl, speaking truths and prophecies. We must find a path out of these places. A chair awaits. A sculpture is a body. Created out of newspapers reconstituted into "threads," Knoop's durational process touches everything: the news of the world as the days pass, one after another. The deluge of news and facts of the world are handled piecemeal. Trails of text and logic are pulped into neural nets then twisted into furniture-forms. History is present: the bedrock of thingness of Knoop's work grabs you in a choke hold, familiar yet alarming. But it isn't just human history that Knoop grapples with. Glide up to the massive wooden tails in the front room, where an imprint of a human ass invites you to sit atop a bulbous and mottled hybrid form. A chair awaits. A poem by Ikkyu in the 13th century: "We live in amazing cages Cages of light Animals animals without end." Both Colón and Knoop make the living their subjects. We exist in our messy and tattered glory. There are still places where safety nets will catch you, where you can struggle and practice emancipatory thrashing. Clasp and release. The works in The Great Game of Power induce meditation, a scramble and then a fingering to find the holes in the net, to find Places of Escape. The Living are ritual holders. Open the locked door. Change the Chair of power. See what happens. —Naropa Sabine Miguel Colón was born in the South Bronx and holds a BFA in painting, with honorable mention, from School of Visual Arts. He studied with notable artists Jack Potter, Marilyn Minter, and Kenny Scharf. He also studied drawing, painting, and sculpting the figure with Irwin Greenberg, Epraim Rubenstein, and Barney Hodes at the Art Students League, and served as instructor's assistant for Costa Vavagiakis at the Art Students League, National Academy of Design, and New York Academy of Art. Miguel was a 2001 recipient of the Edwin Austin Abbey Mural Workshop Grant at the National Academy of Design. His artistic influences include Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Francis Bacon. The organization 14x48 posted his social justice mural, entitled Stand Up, on a billboard in Brooklyn, and First Street Green Art Park in Manhattan displayed another of his large-scale works. He was the subject of a "Brief but Spectacular" profile on the PBS NewsHour. Miguel's painting, entitled Stand Back, is on extended view in a New-York Historical Society installation focusing on the collection of art and objects during the pandemic. Savannah Knoop is a NYC-based multi-disciplinary artist, and writer. They received their BA at CUNY under the mentorship of Vito Acconci, and their MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Sculpture+Extended Media. They have exhibited and performed at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the ICA Philadelphia, the Leslie Lohman Museum, David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami, and Nicelle Beauchene in New York. In 2001, Savannah Knoop founded the clothing line Tinc, which ran until 2009. From 2009-2016 Knoop co-hosted the monthly queer audio-visual party Woahmone. In 2007, they published their memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy (Seven Stories Press) and adapted it into a screenplay, co-producing the resulting feature-length film JT Leroy (Universal Pictures, 2019) directed by Justin Kelly, and starring Kristen Stewart as Knoop. Alongside Brontez Purnell, Knoop is working to adapt his novel, Since I Laid My Burden Down, into a feature film of the same title. Knoop has written essays for the LA Review of Books, 032C, Dazed, Critical Correspondence, and Cultured Magazine.

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