How do you know? There are some questions like should you take the job? Ask the person you love to marry you? Move to another state? That require not just serious thought, but also intuition, and some fact finding. There are other questions, though arguably less important, still important and really only require that last bit, seeking actual verifiable data and answers. The ability to know things has gotten simultaneously much easier and also sometimes impossible. Managing and navigating that duality is essential for being now. In my family, we have an expression when someone shares something that seems like more than an opinion, a fact, and yet it raises some questions. We say, “trust but verify.” How is it possible to do that? That’s what’s gotten so complicated. We used to be able to check the encyclopedia. When I was growing up, we got a new set every year and it was lovingly placed on the bookshelves in the TV room. And just for fun we would think of things that we wanted to look up and know more about.

Similarly nostalgic in a certain way, as kids we learned that when you place a large conch shell to your ear, you can hear some sort of sound or message. It’s a communication device, a hyper analog one, in a profoundly expedient and digitized world.
Alicja Kwade celebrates the analog and knowledge. Her work reminds us both of that desire to hear and know, both the unknown, and that which facilitates if not truth, then at least fact. Titling her sculpture Know-ledge and placing it on a pedestal she creates a punctuation, a moment of pause, an invitation to ask, seek, listen, and know. And when we do, we are better. Take the time to know. It matters.

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