This exhibition presents new drawing, sculptural, and installation works by Roland Knowlden that extend his investigation into paradox, chaos, and the boundaries of representation. Working through processes of mapping, drawing, and sculptural assemblage, Knowlden explores what he calls the self-referential paradox (e.g., negation of a negation) — a space where recursion becomes breakdown, and truth emerges through contradiction. His works operate like diagrams of thought: looping, fractal, and always on the verge of collapse. Each form carries a tension between precision and dissolution, where systems of order — architectural drafting, structural integrity, celestial cartography — fold back on themselves to reveal new possibilities.

 

At the conceptual center of Knowlden’s practice is the question of how the unknown can be spoken, charted, or held, which emerges from Edouard Glissant’s provocation in Poetics of Relation: “Is there no valid language for chaos?” Engaging with the limitations of representation, his work examines the structures that mediate experience: the Cartesian grid, order, and fixed notions of identity. These devices, often tools of control or comprehension, become sites of negation and paradox. For Knowlden, negation is generative — an opening toward the abyss, a space where the cosmic might be glimpsed. The act of making is thus an act of translation, pushing the unknown through the glass until it fractures, revealing the untold energies that rest behind all things.

 

Knowlden’s recent works draw upon cosmic imagery as both method and metaphor, interrogating Johann Bayer’s Uranometria (1603), the first depiction of the 51 constellations and their Eurocentric projection of mythology, ethics, and morality. In recharting two constellations, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor — whose North Star once guided enslaved people toward freedom — his practice traces an Afrofuturist trajectory through acts of orientation and reorientation. These constellations, rendered through precise yet unstable geometries, become diagrams of possibility: fractal, recursive, and open-ended. Within these configurations, positive and negative loop back on themselves, producing a chaotic void — a space of potential meaning. The exhibition becomes a constellation of its own: a shifting sky of paradoxes, where each work is both a point of light and a site of reflection, inviting viewers to navigate the unstable distance between order and chaos, truth and negation.

 

Roland Knowlden would like to extend thanks to Paula Volpato, Isaac Vasquez, and Felipe Pinedas for their critical engagement with the work; Ben Wrapson and Nicolas Rojas at Goldsmiths University; Matteo Crescenzi, Riccardo Raffin, Jenny Spicer, and Tomas Spicer at House Work Presents and ekabo donyi for their words. House Work Presents would like to thank The Five Point Brewing Co- for providing drinks for the opening night.

 

For further information, contact House Work Presents at info@houseworkpresents.com.

 

Roland Knowlden (b. Bayonne, New Jersey) studied Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, and is currently completing an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Knowlden’s practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture and spatial intervention, exploring the poetics of blackness, the unknown, and the imaginary. Recent exhibitions include Document: document (Rabbet Gallery, London, 2025), The Spaces We Call Home (DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, 2024), Black Tributary (Boundary Gallery, Chicago, 2024), and A Love Supreme (Elmhurst Art Museum, 2024). He has participated in institutional and alternative spaces such as the Chicago Cultural Center, 6018 North, and the South Side Community Art Center, and was an architectural contributor to the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial. His work has been featured in publications including LVL3 and Architect Magazine.