Bugs in the System

Multimedia artist Ted Knighton investigates everyday mysteries.

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Feb 20, 2007

INSECT ASIDE: Honey Ant by Ted Knighton (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The walls at International House are crawling with insects. Fortunately, these bugs are the two-dimensional sort. For the next two weeks, I-House is hosting an exhibition of the work of Mount Airy-born filmmaker and graphic artist Ted Knighton, who has an eye for the creepy-crawly.

"They do pop up a lot," Knighton muses on the phone from his Paoli home. "Growing up, they always fascinated me. My grandmother raised her kids and us to respect insects. If there was one in the house, we certainly couldn't kill it. We had to take it outside and put it on a leaf and make sure it was OK. So that probably had something to do with it."

But his grandmother's influence didn't end there. She was an artist and teacher who exposed young Ted to the arts, which started him drawing at an early age.

Knighton's exhibit at I-House includes paintings, drawings, two short films playing on a continuous loop, and a new sculptural installation. "In both his films and his paintings, you are drawn into a complex world of ideas and images that force you to look, and question what you are seeing," says Robert Cargni, program curator of film at I-House.

Cargni sees in Knighton's work "a complexity of conceptual ideas that stem from his expansive imagination, whereby he serves as a vessel through which the energy of multiple ideas is manifest into form."

Knighton's paintings are bold and illustrative, vivid in detail with the sense of a captured essence. His insect artwork magnifies the features of his subjects to human size, drawing parallels between bug and man that become more pronounced in his films.

"I think insects fascinate us in general to the extent that they're like us," Knighton explains. "It's remarkable, especially the social insects, how advanced some of their societies are, how structured they are. And how like our societies they are — that's what's sort of uncanny about it."

Six Insects, produced in 1999, is a 23-minute black-and-white short that examines the behavioral eccentricities of a half-dozen insects using human substitutes. The result is a disturbing, claustrophobic examination of how biological necessity drives society. There is an oppressive, Lynchian relentlessness about it. But the film was inspired by a much friendlier source.

"The idea came to me from a cartoon I saw when I was young," Knighton recalls. A strip called Fun Facts, which ran in the Philadelphia Bulletin, related a flea's leaping ability to the human equivalent — the length of two football fields. "For some reason, that stuck with me. I just thought that was a neat image."

The second film, Testing (2005), is a 19-minute color short with an unseen narrator parsing the moral implications of an unnamed procedure. Meanwhile, the visuals depict the patient/victim of experimental surgery, involving a missing head and a lot of bees.

To achieve the agitated voiceover track, Knighton interviewed a friend about divisive topics, making sure the responses avoided naming the subject. "I wrote down a number of questions which I thought were particularly thorny, on difficult topics that generally nobody likes to talk about," Knighton explained. "I tried to probe him and even make him squirm a bit. Then I took the most uneasy parts of the interview and edited them together. I wanted to extract ethical discomfort from the conversations."

The new piece at the center of the exhibit is the EYE-POD, a "living geode" sculpture housing a rear-projected moving image in its core. The idea came when Knighton was trying to figure out how to project such an image without the ambient light of the gallery space intruding, finally deciding to make the housing a part of the artwork. "The idea of something living inside intrigued me. I think there's something suggestive about looking into this cocoon and seeing an image moving, a little bit more mysterious than just having it projected on a flat screen."

For Knighton, the act of looking and truly seeing is what his work strives toward. "I think it's good to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. I'm certainly not the first one to say that. But it seems like the world and the living things around us are really amazing and strange. We get used to them and it's easy to stop seeing how amazing and violent and wonderful it is, but through art and film I like to move the furniture of life around a little bit so that we see the room again."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

"Multiple Eye: Ted Knighton's Moving Images," runs through March 9, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, www.ihousephilly.org, www.multipleeye.com.

 

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