KAC Announces Over Again: Alison Brady & Sarah Knobel Exhibit 1/8-3/3

For their Seattle-area debut, New York-based Alison Brady and DC-based Sarah Knobel present a collaborative photo-media exhibition, titled Over Again, on view from January 8, 2011 through March 3, 2011 at the Kirkland Arts Center.

Featuring a variety of collaborative and individual works, including video and large-format color photographs, the artists each manifest a personal narrative through darkly humorous revisions of classical formats including the self-portrait and the female nude. Using elements of pop culture and contemporary social constructs the artists create an inverse arc of cognitive dissonance that seeks to disorient the real and surreal. The title of the exhibition, Over Again, draws its name from the exhibition's keystone - a joint video installation that combines the absurd and the banal, wry humor with a low-tech sensibility to create a surreal world that both mourns and celebrates the anxious uncertainty of the everyday.

With this installation the artists examine the process of transitioning from carefree to careful adulthood - how expectations, fears and desires alter. Brady and Knobel draw from their own experiences to present views on human interaction and the malleability of social constructs. Simultaneously alienating and cathartic, the work of Alison Brady and Sara Knobel occupies an uncanny valley between the familiar and the foreign. The imagined and the expected.

Alison Brady is a New York based artist. Her work is compelling, funny, and disturbing. It mucks through unconscious emotions and desires with an aesthetic that vacillates between the banal and the fantastic. Brady exhibits nationally and internationally and her work is featured in a number of private and public holdings including the West Collection and the private collection of Sir Elton John. Her work has been featured in publications such as New York Arts Magazine, Time Out NY and The New York Times. She was named one of the top emerging artists in the world by Saatchi Gallery and holds a MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from The School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Sarah Knobel is an emerging artist based out of Washington DC. Her work shows a personal conflict between ones identity and expectations, both imagined and real. Although Knobel's work can be somewhat humorous, it often ends with the feelings of vulnerability and isolation that suffuse today's society. She has shown both nationally and internationally with work at the SLICK Contemporary Art Fair in Paris, France (2009), the Elaine Levy Project in Brussels, Belgium (2009), and most recently at The University of Central Missouri in 2010 for the exhibition, Playful Things where her work notably confronted the psychologically uncomfortable situations often associated with contemporary milieu.