Footnotes

"Once upon a time [composer] Jim Tenney and I went walking in the woods. We came to a clearing and there under a tree was an arrangement of toy locomotives in the middle of nowhere. Pausing, we mused, where were they going, where had they been?" Attempting to write just such an imaginative history of her own life, and its comings and goings, New York artist Alison Knowles has compiled Footnotes--a collection of collage pages made from small, red travel books collected over thirty years, then pasted up and redrawn, in no definite or logical order. The settings of these collages range from Germany to Japan (but always coming back to New York), with a loosely woven context provided by jotted-down ideas and overheard conversations between her friends. These delicate pencil drawings convey a sense of time lost and regained, displacement and reorientation, of the scattered nature of our interior lives.