Features Overview
OUR LABOUR: 2022
Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art - Clinton, NY
OUR LABOUR builds upon the artist’s recent explorations into the intersections between the human form, the natural world, and the built environment. A Brooklyn-based artist who was raised in Chicago, Klos employs a process of collaging woodblock prints to engage ideas about Blackness as a constructed identity and as an adaptable material for survival. Foregrounded in a series of print-based and sculptural works created especially for this exhibition—including the collaborative mural When the Parts Untangle realized with the assistance of Hamilton students—the exhibition considers how familial, geographic, and narrative histories inform notions of identity. This body of work is inspired by a recent life-changing event that led Klos to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of his family’s multigenerational history working at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. The work on view incorporates representations of aunts, uncles, cousins, and other relations— both figuratively and metaphorically—alongside mechanical and natural elements such as car engines, gears, flowers, and vines. Klos’s approach is a means of both untangling and connecting his own complex and sprawling genealogy. With this exhibition, Klos also introduces works conceived around an examination of labor through both deeply personal and historic lenses.
How We Hold It All Together: 2021
UTA Artist Space - Los Angeles
Klos, a Brooklyn-based Chicago native, created this body of work while living in Los Angeles during the pandemic. His works are full of illusionistic depth and space, appearing to be images of sculptural forms built from wood scraps, crystals and brick. Klos’ figures challenge singular notions of identity, as he often merges his own features with those of his models.
“Many of these images are of the family I’ve built throughout my life,” said Klos. “Being raised with very little family, I’ve learned that ‘family’ members are the people who we survive with and for.”
Avoiding direct portraiture, Klos depicts these ‘sculptural models’ of identities as if built from the construction materials of urban detritus. He employs a unique paper construction process by carving into blocks of wood, then inking and printing the relief surface onto archival papers. This source material is then collaged in several layers to create fractured planes.
Klos refers to Chicago’s urban planning for racial segregation through grids and axonometric block forms. Viewers witness heads falling from, and breaking through, grids of wood planks and bricks — as if being born from or negotiating their existence within these building materials.
As Below, So Above : 2015
Jack Tilton Gallery - New York City
“As Below, So Above” is the inverse of “As Above, So Below,” a quote from an ancient Egyptian text on alchemy. If alchemy is the science of converting base metals into precious metals, Klos’s alchemy is made evident through his process and materials: he transforms flat paper into something dimensional and monumental. The materials he references, 2 by 4s, cinderblocks and rocks, defy their functions as practical construction debris and often appear to defy gravity as well, becoming animated and possessed. The mundane become mystical.