Adam Knight’s work investigates synchronicities and disjunctions of meaning which exist between the codified spaces of the artist’s studio, the gallery and art school. By negotiating formal trajectories within the context of the white cube and in academia, his practice seeks to reconcile histories of conceptual art making with present processes of production.

Loss Velocity relays these concerns through the use of resonant sound and recorded motion, activating sculptural absences and presences latent within 7.9 Cubic Metres. The work refers to two incidents within the history of contemporary art. In 1969, Barry Le Va had presented ‘Velocity Piece’, a work comprising two speakers installed at either end of the gallery, and from which emanated the sound of Le Va’s footsteps and his body impacted against the wall, all for the duration of 1 hour and 49 minutes. A year earlier, Bruce Nauman performed ‘Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms’. Nauman had bounced two balls in the centre of a marked square on his studio floor, throwing them as forcefully as he could while trying to maintain a constant rhythm as the balls and the recorded image would ricochet unpredictably and out of sync.

Adam Knight’s Loss Velocity derives from a pre-recorded performance where the artist, governed by a set of self-imposed rules, had bounced a ball between the floor and ceiling of 7.9 Cubic Metres white cube for the duration of 1 hour and 49 minutes. The corresponding audio produced was recorded through two separate sound devices, subsequently collapsed into a stereo channel and replayed through two speakers embedded within the gallery. While the resulting effect encapsulates the physical tedium the artist had experienced while executing the act itself, Loss Velocity simultaneously deliberates its removal from, and problematises its categorical relation to performance art. No one was witness to Knight’s performance in real time and no further relics of the performance, in the form of videos or photographs will be exhibited.

Instead, the work, which privileges the idea as gesture and as moment, suggests the absence of the artist’s body as a sculptural index within the gallery. Both the artist and the viewer are consequently ‘performed’ by the work. That the 7.9 Cubic Metres micro-gallery is situated within Studio 2 of Stanley Picker gallery further enunciates slippages and disruptions of meaning existent between spaces and their contextual functions. Degrees of self-reflexivity in relation to the values ascribed to a work by its situation within existing institutional parameters come into question. It is by activating the scrutiny of resistive processes of art making and of viewership that Loss Velocity, as Knight has described, might ‘begin to suggest a potential for kinesis for the ceaselessly static white cube’.

The performance was governed by four rules:
1. The performance was to last for the same duration as Le Va’s ‘Velocity Piece’.
2. The performance would attempt to synchronise both balls together.
3. Both balls needed to hit the floor and the ceiling at least once.
4. No one would witness the performance.