Alison Knowles - Silk Screenings

Silk Screenings

In 1960, Knowles began producing silk screen paintings. From 1963 until the middle 1970s, Knowles used print to express her process-based concerns. In 1963, she collaborated with Robert Watts and George Brecht in the Scissor Brothers Warehouse show to make an eighteen inch square printed painting consisting of three images chosen by each artist. This image appeared on everything from canvas to bathing suits and hair brushes and were sold for random prices at a special sale at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles. She collaborated with George Brecht again on the 1983 book The Red, the Green, the Yellow the Black and the White

In 1973, Knowles produced a series of prints called Identical Lunch Graphic, which showcased many of her friends and Fluxus colleagues consuming the Identical Lunch. The prints included a Starkist logo which was withdrawn due to copyright infringement. Since 1978, Knowles has published limited print runs of found and manipulated graphic materials with Italian publishers Francesco Conz and Rosanna Chiesi.

Recently, Knowles has experimented with light sensitive chemicals that produce photographic prints on paper and cloth which can be manipulated by hand. The most sustained of these was her Bread and Water cycle of palladium prints and cyanotypes, which inspired a sound work and book.