Jasper de Beijer (1973) will be presenting a selection from his new series
Mr. Knight’s World Band Receiver
This presentation marks the artist’s debut at Galerie Ron Mandos.
About Mr. Knight’s World Band Receiver
In 1986, 18-year-old Christopher Knight trekked into the Maine woods. After pitching an improvised camp, he remained there in virtual isolation for the next 27 years.
For decades, the ‘North Pond Hermit’ avoided all contact with other people. He didn’t even make campfires, for fear of being discovered. Knight kept track of what was going on in the outside world by listening to news radio and rock stations on a battery-operated radio. He was ultimately apprehended by the police for burglarizing vacation cabins and a nearby holiday camp.
With a radio as his sole source of information, Knight was more or less untouched by the visual deluge of the past three decades. His mental picture of recent events must have been entirely different to the images that are so familiar to us. Knight’s lonely forest clearing, these same events materialized in a self-contained universe. In his mind’s eye, the general, abstract reports on the radio were converted into specific visual details: a kind of ‘reverse empiricism’.
For his new series, the artist decided to keep clear of all photos and other visual input, consciously limiting himself to the bare reports. The images that have come out of this approach – created in response to more or less iconic events in recent history – are uniquely subjective. They have wrenched themselves free of historical reality: in the one work, a minor detail takes center stage; in the other, a familiar event has acquired a new emotional charge.
The images could just as easily be relating an entirely different story; the blueprints of an alternate reality. Like the stream of consciousness that constantly unfurls in our mind, they are the artefacts of an inner world that at times seems almost random – or that at any rate is entirely personal, in every aspect.
Unseen will take place from 18 to 21 September 2014.
Opening hours are as follows:
Thursday 12.00 – 20.00
Friday 12.00 – 22.00
Saturday 11.00 – 20.00
Sunday 11.00 – 17.00
Fair & Festival Site
Westergasfabriek
Klönneplein 1
1014 DD Amsterdam
The Netherlands