Samir Knego

Artist Statement

I'm an abstract artist whose work is steeped in my lifelong experience of disability. Though painting and drawing form the core of my work, my artwork is quite varied--I also incorporate paper weaving, photocopier art, poetry, and photography, and make zines. I often mix media, stacking layers to say and do things that painting and drawing alone cannot. I've sometimes said that accessibility has to be multidisciplinary because that’s the only way to account for the variety of ways of sensing/learning/being in the world, and I think my interest in disability and accessibility has naturally led to this variety in my work. Lines like those on topographic maps run throughout my work. Though my work isn’t naturalist in the traditional sense, I’m heavily inspired by nature and natural science--not just the imagery of topography, but also that of circuitry, cells, and skeletons. I try to bridge the natural and the human-made, and hopefully make both feel a bit unfamiliar. When I’m working, I imagine myself taking the smallest, shortest moments in time and stretching them out onto my page past the point of visibility until they become slightly distorted--but beautiful in a different way. I think that disability has influenced my (positive) thinking about (typically negative) things like abnormality and deformity.