Saturday Midnight Drive.
Linoleum Relief Cut Print.
22.86 cm x 30.48 cm / 9 inches x 12 inches.
Price: $125 USD / Each, Edition of 100.

trevorknapp.com

Commentary from Adam Holzrichter & Bruno Passos.

From Bruno Passos:

A hidden gem, this is Trevor Knapp. Although his prints are essentially urban scenes, his works do not portray places, but states of mind, a kind of constant non-belonging.

Appreciating his work requires introspection on the part of the viewer, it’s not something made to jump into instagram stories or to pause your eyes during an infinite scroll on your cell phone bar, no sir.

Trevor acts like a friendly fire in winter, a soft, welcoming company that somehow shows we’re not alone, even though there’s no one else in the room.

Saturday Midnight Drive is a great example: a car heading to infinity, detaching itself from the city it should belong, the driver has little choice, the hand on the steering wheel seems more like a habit than a necessity. We are perplexed by the vertigo, but sober in the face of all the inconsistency of life, a feeling typical of dreams: the naturalization of the absurd.

Around it, other cars fall, perhaps as if their drivers had lost the ability to dream and with that they ended up giving in to the magnet of materiality, of the oblique and short notion of what we consider “real” and correct.
Sensitivity, sincerity and a unique ability to capture the zeitgeist of outsiders, Trevor is certainly one of the most powerful living engravers in the world.

From Adam Holzrichter:

Firstly, I notice this car is driving into the sky. I notice there is a vehicle behind the driver, and what looks to be a road with 2 lanes. This makes me question my own eyes. I am forced to reinterpret what would otherwise have been a scene from a supernatural or science fiction novel. Now I am engaged. I begin to wonder if there is a logical explanation for this surreal imagery. Perhaps the driver has fallen asleep behind the wheel. There may be a perfectly rational reason for the bird’s eye view of the city in rear view. I notice sunglasses on the dashboard. It’s night time, and the driver is asleep after all… “Saturday Midnight Drive”. That’s what I’ve decided to believe today. Who knows what I will think tomorrow?

Trevor Knapp’s mysterious worlds draw me in with unpretentious humanity. The familiar objects and characters guide me by the hand into a world which often seems somehow more interactive than the one I’m used to living in. I am instantly curious. The more time I spend observing the variety of marks being made the more I feel I can see the artist’s own belief in this universe he has created.

Notes on the work – by Trevor Knapp.

Man… I spent a lot of time thinking and mulling over this piece since I created it, and I don’t want to write this whole overintellectualized “bigger than it truly is” artwork… a small linocut I created back in the day. But, I can’t help but try to bring up some of its history and what went into its making, because when you understand some of the context… it can at least become a little more interesting.

Let me at least start with the Dream…

So, here I am, in my younger self in 2011, I am in my family home and it is nighttime. My brother is hosting a small party of friends and family. I depart from the guests and venture into a darker part of the house, less lights on. Suddenly, I drift into a deep exhaustion and fall asleep in one of the darkest parts of the house.

I wake to find myself driving this vehicle on a highway passing by a city, but then takes me through the city and out. It’s not quite day, but it’s not night either, just this greyness, everything lacking depth of color. As I am making sense of my surroundings, I see ahead of me this wall looking structure that I’m heading straight toward, but not worried in the slightest. As I am about to hit this wall, suddenly I am driving up it. It is still the highway, with lanes and all. Other cars are following suit as if this is a normal traffic pattern, driving up and away from the middle of this city. I look back to take stock in my surroundings again, as shown in the image I created.

Cars are falling about me, and some are holding to the highway, like mine. Then the highway switches again, and we are upside down, driving high above the city and looking down. A sight to behold. Then, I wake back into the dark part of my family home. I tell them of what happened. Then, I wake again. I am in an airport, old friends I have not seen in some time wake me to get on a flight.

And then I wake up from the Dream.

When I was creating this piece, I was trying to find what exact city it was that I saw in my dream. After searching and searching and searching, I found that it was Chicago. I had this dream 3 years before I moved to Chicago – the place that spawned my print series, Memories of A Metropolis. This work brought me creative growth that I wished for in my early years of painting and printmaking… when I was in a dark place. A dark place within my own home, myself.

Say what you will about dreams, but I believe them to hold something so mysterious… that I will keep searching for an understanding. And that search for understanding, for meaning, brings me to where I am now, and I am all the more glad of it.

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