KNEASS+GNORSKI

There’s something almost religious about watching wood surrender to human will, and in this pairing of Ruth Charlotte Kneass and John Gnorski, we witness two distinct liturgies of transformation.

Kneass performs miracles of balance—her mobiles hang like prayers made manifest, each element carved and turned to impossible perfection, defying gravity with the casual grace of birds in flight. Her 8-14 foot mobiles don’t just fill space; they sanctify it.

Gnorski works closer to the ground, closer to the grit of making. His woodblock prints carry the ghost of every gouge, every pressure of hand against tool against wood. Where Kneass achieves transcendence, Gnorski courts the beautiful accident—ink pooling in carved valleys, the grain asserting itself against his tiger houses and moon-lit horses. His “Woman with Bird” suggests that the most profound encounters happen when we’re not quite looking.

Both artists emerge from that particular California crucible where the counterculture met craft tradition and decided to stay. They are inheritors of the Bolinas-Point Reyes axis of making, where the Pacific fog rolls in over studios filled with wood shavings and the sound of careful chiseling. Kneass comes from four generations of boatbuilders; Gnorski salvages construction-site plywood and transforms it into something approaching the sacred.

What unites them is an almost anachronistic faith in the hand, in the slow accumulation of skill, in wood as a collaborator rather than mere material. In our age of digital everything, they insist on the irreplaceable primacy of touch. Their dialogue across the gallery space feels like a conversation between earth and air, weight and weightlessness, the grounded and the sublime.

KNEASS + GNORSKI will be on view through Saturday the 18th of October. Th-Sat from noon to five or by appointment.