Horizon, Expanse: A Source and A Mirage

Roland Knowlden

July 14, 2023 - August 26, 2023

“(Expanse [extending] ramified its web. Leap and Variance, in another poetics. Transversality, Quantifiable infinity. Unrealized quantity. inexhaustible tangle. Expanse [extending] is not merely space; it is also its own dreamed time.)”

-Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

As a simplified representation, Knowlden’s preconceived image of Liberia was an abstraction, formed from a memory in the stories of his parents, who always called it home. Horizon, Expanse collapses two shifts in the artist’s life; his first time in Liberia at the age of 20, and his time studying at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. 

Aerial images (from his father’s archives of the mines that scarred Yekapa, Liberia, and from IIT’s campus development that scarred the urban fabric in Bronzeville) become materials to construct imagined cityscapes and render visible the layered complexities of our built environment. 

Two geographies extend across a horizon, one where iron ore is stripped out of the landscape to create steel, and the other where steel structures form a skyline. They are entangled, fractured, and complicated through their histories of extraction, to insist upon the act of imagining otherwise.