Rainen Knecht, Alive! with Pleasure, Et al. Gallery
Rainen Knecht, How to Communicate With the Dead, Mixed Media, 28x27 inches, 2026
Art can be a chore. Do you lately find yourself exhausted by the display of personal vivisection in digital content, or with your eyes glazing over, unable to take in the opaque babble of terse works from antiquity? As you undertake the mirthless rigor of trying to find something valuable, you begin to question yourself, the artist, and the institution — until something redeeming comes along. If this describes you, harken, friend — Et al. has the medicine. Past the stacks of lovingly thumbed used books lies a simple labyrinth of galleries, one of which contains a splendidly unironic and mirthful exhibition by Rainen Knecht in her show, Alive! With pleasure. Under the warm sunbeams emanating from the skylight, Knecht fills the room with a collection of fairy-tale warmth, neither saccharin nor bitter. Like Goldilocks taking to a bowl of porridge, you’ll perhaps declare it “just right.”
Knecht describes her studio as situated in the only way proper to a Pacific Northwesterner: proximal to a creek, at the bottom of a butte, about 20 minutes from her home in East Portland. Here, she fabricates playful frames from wood, appliqued with clay, baubles, and hand-beaded spiderwebs. These wreathe her figurative paintings. “Children’s literature and fairytales are a huge influence, like Mother Goose-style nursery rhymes,” she says, recalling the words to Old Mother Hubbard, one of her daughters’ favorites:
Old Mother Hubbard,
Went to the Cupboard,
To give the poor Dog a bone;
When she came there,
The Cupboard was bare,
And so the poor Dog had none
During her time in school in the early aughts, representational painting was treated as passé, superseded by new media. She wondered whether she might have preferred illustrating children’s books. It took a decade for her fine arts training and love for the sweet-macabre world of children’s stories to coalesce, but the themes are present in her motifs: people living in boots, apples, the aforementioned dogs and spiders, to name a few.
Rainen Knecht, Up on a Shelf, Mixed Media, 30x48 inches, 2026
After a long stay in the Bay and then a stint in Los Angeles, Knecht returned to the PNW in 2014, when her mother became sick with cancer. The transformation of her mother’s body as a result of the chemotherapy inspired a return to the figure, a ‘stubborn yet transformative object,’ reads her artist’s statement for the show. Shortly after her mother passed, she became a mother herself, forging work between her baby’s bedtime and midnight in the garage. During our phone call, she is explaining that her practice slowed to a halt when first becoming a parent, and how she discovered that she works best when she has a deadline, until she breaks away from the conversation for a moment. She is pausing to explain to her inquiring daughter, Freddy, who is home for the summer, that she is preoccupied for a few minutes more. Reflexively, she tends to the smorgasbord of life surrounding her in perfect verisimilitude, a tendency reflected in the feast of media in her work.
Rainen Knecht, Shoreline Sheela, Mixed Media, 23x19 inches, 2026
Knecht doesn’t pretend to exist in a vacuum. She cites her education at SFAI from 2001-2006 as a site of inheritance of regional traditions. Influences like Joan Brown, David Park, and Manuel Neri of the Bay Area Figuration movement were passed from teacher to student. Bay Area Funk artist Roy DeForest also plays into her pedagogical lineage. Add this to the fact that she has been a studio assistant to sculpture artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins for 8 years, and her technical ability to form a flush, solid structure from an unusual cast of archival characters paints a picture of technical expertise and carefully applied aesthetic logic.
Clayton Schuster describes Bay Area Funk in an article for Hyperallergic as “ugly rather than beautiful, rough rather than refined, and funny rather than respectful.” While I certainly wouldn’t call Knecht’s work ugly, it does emanate a color palette like a spoiled Fauvist still life. Starring figures with exaggerated, witch-like features, she renders the subjects with a decrepitude incongruent with their joy — they are smiling, embracing, looking into each other’s eyes. Decisive brush strokes of swirling greens are punctuated with sudden shocks of pink—Knecht says of her technique that she completes paintings rather quickly, and tends to spend a lot of time stepping back and looking.
The repeated approach to found object assemblage framing of the figurative paintings creates an irresistible approachability to the work — upon close inspection, the frames are expertly fabricated. A truck is appliqued with sheets of flush enameled copper, bolted down in carefully measured intervals; a toy telephone is stretched over with vintage floral fabric, not a wrinkle to be found in its facade; a rotten tooth is painted like a fresco, with witch fingers and elusive faces appearing between inlaid pearls and bits of blood-red fringe. I am taken with the beaded spiderwebs that stretch across a repurposed shelf that Knecht found in her daughter's room, which she decided to repurpose when she realized there was no use for it on account of the converted attic’s vaulted ceilings.
Rainen Knecht, Emergency Contact, Mixed Media, 29x20 inches, 2026
Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour, the co-curators of Et al. for 15+ years, are similarly charmed with these particular aspects of the work, saying, “Going in, we could never have guessed, more or less expected, the incredible attention to framing and materials of these new works, and that potential for surprise is the best part of Et al. for us.” When asked why they included this work in their roster of exhibitions, Harbour said, “We consistently drive our decisions about what to exhibit based upon our personal interests, relationships, and what we come across looking at art locally and beyond. We've loved Rainen's work for ages…Our curatorial choices revolve around providing opportunities to artists, curators, writers etc we are interested in, and then letting the exhibitions we host be driven by these people.’
Et al. is an oasis of sincerity in an art world that sometimes struggles in its preoccupation with genuflection to academia, palatability, or crowd appeal. Naturally, at the same time as Knecht’s show, Et al. hosted the annual SF Art Book Fair, one of the local artist community's favorite events of the year. Before ‘community’ started being thrown around like an HR department’s safe word, the Bay Area’s art scene simply was a community. Knecht’s work doubles down on the approachability of Et al., and the lack of self-consciousness between the two acts as a balm. You can visit the works of Alive! With Pleasure at Et al. gallery on Mission between 24th and 25th St., until its deinstallation on August 31.
