Dominique Knowles (Bahamian, b. 1996) lives & works in Chicago, IL. Knowles received both his MFA in Painting as a New Artist Society Award scholar in 2020 & BFA in 2017 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include Goldfinch Projects (Chicago, IL), The Green Gallery East (Milwaukee, WI) and The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (Nassau, Bahamas). Knowles has had group exhibitions at Emanuel Layr (Vienna, Austria) hosted by Sperling (Munich, Germany) Popop Studios (Nassau, Bahamas), The Bahamas International Film Festival (Nassau, Bahamas), The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, Medulla Gallery (Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago), 14°N 61°W (Martinique), HilgerBROTKunsthalle (Vienna, Austria), Halle 14 (Leipzig, Germany), Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, Illinois), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago, IL), The Packing Plant (Nashville, TN) and Julius Caesar (Chicago, IL). Knowles has participated in residencies at The Suburban (Milwaukee, WI) & Liquid Courage Gallery (Nassau, Bahamas). He has curated group exhibitions at Popopstudios (Nassau, Bahamas) and The Condo Association (Chicago, IL). Knowles is featured in publications such as Artforum online, The Chicago Tribune, Bad at Sports, Hyperallergic, Arc Magazine, Blank Canvas podcast, New American Painting, The Seen Journal and The Poor Farm Press. His work can be found in private collections of Dr. Daniel S. Berger & Scott Wenthe, David Salkin & Dirk Denison, and The Dawn Davies Collection.
Knowles’ work invites through the archetypal & moves beyond as an incredibly specific expression of interspecies companionship. At once a seemingly private language, its monumental character reveals that the work is generated from primordial knowledge. His paintings garner strength from the formless, fluid movement of unbounded rhythm.
His poetics are epic in scale, with an intimate cadence that ebbs & flows in sub-realities. There’s a symbiosis of confessional narrative & emotional lyric, acting as a soft ground for a central figure of luminously erotic queer desire.
Romantic longing nourishes an empathic absorption into a space pulsating with aliveness. The aesthetic’s consistent resonance of humane & animal grief is redemptive. Through alchemy, there’s hope for rebirth as its ochre atmosphere breathes prenatal warmth & a givenness for meditations on ancient sentience.
This open & untethered vision of interbeing is more than a pollyannish dream of a beautiful ecology. The stakes of this cosmology are deep within their solemn contemplation of what is nature, how does one maintain another’s quality of life & what capacity of being death doula allows for a way to die with dignity & grace?
