Mixed media on paper

In visiting the studio of Amanda Knowles you will see work in process and finished work as well as all the ephemeral of making and visual references.

I am a city dweller. As a child on the East Coast, I was put to sleep by the glow of the stoplight on the corner cycling through green… yellow… red. At 10 we moved to the country and, for a couple of years, I commuted by train back to the city for school. Every morning I watched as the trees fell away and buildings grew in their place and every evening these buildings and gridded city streets were replaced by fields and curving country roads. I fell hard for the infrastructure that ran alongside the tracks as we approached the city. It made me think that I was part of something bigger and it lulled me. When I moved to the Midwest for graduate school of course I noticed the lush greens of the summer foliage and their autumnal flamboyance, the lakes that froze every winter, but I once again fell for the infrastructure, the human ingenuity. My interest began with the grain silos and, from there, the power station distributing energy to the town. My photos of that time are dotted with these structures. Now, living in the Pacific Northwest I have been soaking in the slow and steady build happening around me. I have watched expectantly as the city around me changes in one sort of progress, constant “betterment” and all of the implications of that idea.
In its making my work is about a thinking through. It shadows a belonging, the building of a life story, and the documentation of this life. I use double exposures made in a Holga plastic camera and photos as a sketchbook. This is where I explore my surroundings and document when I am paying attention. I combine these photographs with images from high gloss architectural and interior design magazines, blurring the difference of my single life with documentation our shared dream lives and then abstracting both through the manipulation and combination of these images with painting and drawing. Here I create a melded, blurred, and new city.

In February Amanda Knowles participated in the Vashon Artist Residency. In August-September she will head to Mexico City for an artist residency at Casa Lu. She is interested in the visuals of cities and will be exploring Mexico City through photography which she will then work into her mixed media pieces.

Amanda Knowles was raised in Philadelphia, PA. She earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She currently teaches printmaking and drawing at North Seattle College, and is the director of the NSC Art Gallery.

There is street parking and visitors will come up the driveway passing by the house on the left before finding Amanda’s studio at the back of the property. There is some lawn and uneven rock steps without a railing to get into Amanda’s studio.