Karla Knight | Fine Tuner
Gallery Wendi Norris
436 Jackson Street, San Francisco
Gallery Wendi Norris is proud to present Fine Tuner, the first solo exhibition of Karla Knight on the West Coast. On view November 5 through December 23, the exhibition brings together Knight's newest "tapestries"—large works on reclaimed cotton sacks—alongside recent paintings, collages, and works on paper, as well as pages from her Spaceship Notebooks. Nearly all of the works are being shown publicly for the first time.
For more than four decades, Karla Knight (b. 1958, New York, NY) has developed a visual lexicon that is both pictographic—spaceships, orbs, eyes—and logographic, made up of imaginary language, charts, and invented signs. She arranges these elements into orderly, diagrammatic compositions that resemble astronomical charts, instruction manuals, or control panels for some unknown purpose. Her sources are at once archaic and of the space age, among them Surrealism, early twentieth-century abstraction, Jungian psychology, and astronomy.
“My work has no key or methods of decoding,” says Knight. “The true meaning is unknown, even to me. It's not about deciphering or sending a message; it's about living with the unknown. I have no spiritual agenda or ideology. I simply trust the universe.”
Knight's interest in the unexplained began in childhood. Her father wrote books about UFOs, ESP, and the occult, and her grandfather, also a writer, published a book on communicating with the dead. She grew up in a household where such forces were taken as a matter of course, and her work draws no firm line between the empirical and the mystical. Reviewing her recent exhibition Orbit at Andrew Edlin Gallery, Brian Karl wrote in Hyperallergic that Knight's "lively yet methodical two-dimensional grids imply not only a third dimension but further significant under-attended dimensions, if only we could parse the signs inscribed for us."
The large “tapestries,” her newest body of work, are made from cotton seed and grain bags from the 1940s and '50s. Knight pieces the bags into patchwork grounds. She then draws and paints directly on the fabric with flashe (a matte, vinyl-based paint), colored pencil, and graphite, and hand-embroiders selected passages. The stains, patches, and repairs from the bags' earlier use remain visible. In Feelers (2025–26), a work more than five feet square, and in Astronomy for Everybody and Blue Tuner (both 2026), the systems of her drawings extend across the full field of the cloth.
The works on paper carry a similar vocabulary at a smaller scale. A group of four 2026 drawings, each built around a field of deep blue, bears titles such as Counting Meteors (And Life Goes On) and Satellites in Outer Space (Rolling Along). In the Little Orbit Drawings, renderings of comets and cratered lunar surfaces in graphite and colored pencil sit within Knight's framework of charts and signs. The Spaceship Notebooks, eleven volumes to date, are where Knight works out new forms in repurposed engineering notebooks; the exhibition presents a selection of their pages, offering a view into Knight’s process.
About the artist
Karla Knight (b. 1958, New York, NY) lives and works in Redding, CT. Her work has been exhibited widely, recently in Once Within a Time, the 12th SITE Santa Fe International, curated by Cecilia Alemani (2025–26), and Transe at Gomide & Co., São Paulo. Her first solo museum exhibition, Navigator, was held at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT (2021–22). It was accompanied by a monograph with text by Amy Smith-Stewart; a second edition, with an essay by Cassie Packard, was published in 2023. Recent solo exhibitions also include Orbit (2026) and Universal Remote (2023) at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, which represents the artist.
Knight's work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others. She has received fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo, as well as two Connecticut Artist Fellowships. She received her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1980.
