Solo show ‘Elsewhere’ is affecting look at magical, vulnerable girlhood

Bottom line: By turns unnerving and sweet, Kent Knowles’ show centered on young girls shows the artist’s range.

Kent Knowles’ paintings seem to straddle a line, between childhood fairy tales and darker, pathos-ridden young adult novels. Knowles’ drawings, sculptures, works on ceramic and paintings conjure up a strange limbo somewhere between childhood and adolescence in his solo show “Elsewhere” at Kai Lin Art.

In Knowles’ large-scale paintings, awkward young women with plain faces and ambiguous expressions stand by the sea, in forests or before marshland, navigating a strange, enchanted natural world.

A young girl clutches a black spiny sea urchin and swims with an octopus, whose tentacles wrap menacingly around her legs, in “Urchin.” In the comparably odd and slightly creepy “Daisy Chain,” a pair of girls in a forest setting are surrounded by bugs and moths of realistic and also gargantuan proportions. A magical connection to nature and young girls able to coexist and commune with other creatures suggest comparable stories of enchanted heroines like Snow White.

Along with deer and sea creatures, eels and birds, Knowles’ show is awash in fat, furry, winged and richly colored bugs and moths. “Bugs” features seven bug sculptures pinned to the wall like etymological specimens, an insect motif that repeats throughout the exhibition. The omnipresence of moths in the show gives a sense of a world undergoing some metamorphosis, similar to the transition from child to woman seen in Knowles’ gangly female subjects. The quiet, mildly disturbing reveries where golden-haired lasses grip eels or placidly hold white owls give the paintings a tone somewhere between Andrew Wyeth’s moody portraits of women and more contemporary artists like Lisa Yuskavage or John Currin.

In “Elsewhere,” a girl wearing an expression of ecstatic reverie lies in a meadow, head thrown back, her body bookended by two deer who protectively surround her. As in many of Knowles’ paintings, the sky above her is a dramatic, otherworldly shade of blue and pink, the mottled cotton candy clouds oddly similar to the raw pink skin tone of his heroines.

None of the girls in Knowles’ world would likely be characterized as great beauties. Part of the delight of the works and the connection we may feel lies in their gangliness, so different from the porcelain-skinned, rosy-cheeked beauties seen in most artworks. Knowles plays up that painful awkwardness, placing eyes too far apart on heads in his simple drawings of girls on white porcelain plates, emphasizing messy hair and blotchy skin. His paintings are unusual in many ways, but it is that devotion to — and affection for — these goofy, ungainly girls that marks him in a class by himself.

“Elsewhere” is the first solo show devoted to a single artist since Kai Lin Art’s opening, and Knowles certainly has the imagination and material to fill the space: 30 paintings, 20 drawings and seven sculptural works. He ranges all over the map in “Elsewhere,” from simple drawings of his iconic oddball girls on porcelain plates, to small, often deeply affecting drawings and sculptures that range from the unsettling to the routine.

As a rule, the sculptures — of feathery-winged moths and glossy black beetles — don’t have the impact or resonance of the paintings and drawings, save one, titled “Ghost.” An unnervingly creepy work placed in a small nook in the gallery, the 54-inch figure shrouded in a yellow-and-white polka-dot blanket gives one the uncanny sensation of something real and alive lurking beneath that shroud.

While Knowles’ paintings are the showstoppers, with the material and color scheme to command attention, it is actually two small but arresting drawings, “Gloria” and “Beatrice,” in the ancillary Grey Gallery that really allow you to lose yourself in these girls’ internal reveries. “Beatrice” is especially poignant, a portrait of a girl in bangs and fussy Peter Pan collar sitting in a way that suggests a school portrait. Gingerly but decisively gripped in her hands is a small bird, which seems to echo her fragility. It’s a marvelous piece, full of subtle feeling, one of the high points in a worthwhile show.