Gallery talk with the artist: Friday, April 17th, 2015 at 12:00

The Exhibition closes Saturday, April 25th

In ‘Truth and Method’, Know Hope continues his observation, and one's symbiotic relationship with his/her surroundings. The starting point for this exhibition is the artist’s text-based outdoor work. These street pieces are created in a site-specific manner, with the intention of 'suggesting an image' as opposed to illustrating it. It focuses on allowing the real life human situations that happen around the text to create the image; providing the opportunity for the surroundings to take a more active part in the dialogue and create an organic integration of these images.

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Following this, the artist tattooed those same texts on people. The participants were all complete strangers, whom were reached through an open call. The idea was to slightly alter the conduct-because people, unlike walls, actively create these images in everyday situations, inevitably creating new meanings for the phrases that have become a permanent part of their personal narratives.

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Later, he made a series of portraits of the tattooed individuals, in everyday situations, with the new contexts creating a new meaning for the same text that arose from the participant’s personal narratives.

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The process was extremely intimate, emotionally and technically (all the tattoos were done by the artist himself in the stick and poke method, with no machines used) and brought up notions regarding trust, vulnerability and the ephemeral vs. the permanent.

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Finally, Know Hope created a series of gallery pieces that also uses the original text as a starting point, but consists of the artist’s iconography that translates these human situations into more universal/less specific ones. Essentially, the exhibition is composed of a series of triptychs- the photograph of the original outdoor work, a photographed portrait of the participant and a studio piece, that together portray three 'translations' to the original text.

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Know Hope’s work has always been based on real human situations; this project gives insight to this process, and also functions as a conceptual research that deals with context and appropriation.