About

Lueking Knabe is a maker and fiber artist based out of the Midwest. Their work is an attempt to join communities in a shared act of experience and conversation through their interaction. The body becomes aware of its state as a gendered political being as the artist uses a combination of found and handmade objects to question the space between us and the unity we find in sharing resources. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” Knabe examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. A queer phenomenology, Knabe contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.

Knabe is a BFA candidate in Fiber studying at the Kansas City Art Institute scheduled to graduate in May of 2020. Their program series “Queering Craft” has been hosted by the East Gallery and UMKC Gallery of Art in a defiant act of collaborating with craft knowledge and understanding how bonds are found in the fibers we share during a political period of division. 

Artist Statement

I am a researcher of washed histories, making specific objects that unpack the ever evolving queer identity and the history that transcends contemporary identity politics. Appropriating traditional quiltmaking patterns, I Introduce loaded symbols referencing the queer spirit. I use my work as a body of educational objects enriched with an effervescent and bubbling wealth of references pulled from various archives of personal and public histories. Materials such as glass, leather, books, acrylic, paper, mirrors, stainless steel piercings and appropriated imagery allow for me to manifest these worlds of private and public life. The very notion of a queer space is contradictory.  Considering the fluidity of queer identity and the rigidity of a defined space; splicing the private and public, my work seeks to find a reality that is intentionally constructed within contradiction. 

As a child, researching history alone and trying to find a part of myself within it,  I was left feeling isolated. As I discovered my own identity, I ditched the textbook, uncovering a hidden legacy of queer impact on culture that dates back to ancient greek and roman periods, evolving into the cruising culture found in the Britain Molly Houses of 19th century to the American Bathhouses of 20th century leading to contemporary Grindr culture. 

My work seeks to engage with those who have been miseducated. The connections between queer and non-queer identity is rooted in a constructed separation but rejoined by individuality of the self. The true self is a performative transcendance. Our existence as sentient beings is universal and our legacy is to be joined moving forward, pushing away the shrouding of other history and uniting in our contemporary understanding of what it means to be a person and where we come from.