
Autumn Knight’s NOTHING#15: a bed represented the second of a three-part series—NOTHING#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff—interrogating the Italian notion of “dolce far niente,” meaning “the sweetness of doing nothing.” For this chapter, presented Oct. 10-12 at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Knight leveraged the notion of doing nothing as a space for the consideration of loss. This performance, which unfolded between two people, elucidated the interlinked nature of different kinds of loss, and how its seemingly mundane manifestations are bound to those most profound and inexpressible.
NOTHING#15: a bed began as audiences, who had been waiting in the lobby at PICA, were invited into its giant warehouse gallery by a staff member, with the caveat that we should stay close to the periphery at first. The space was filled with haze, filtering the glow of many fluorescent tube lights that outlined the right-angled geometry of an elaborate installation, which I later learned was called NOTHING: all at once. Most of these lights remained on consistently, while a few flickered intermittently from various nooks and crannies. This exhibition was developed by Knight to co-occur with these performances, and will remain on view in the PICA warehouse gallery through Dec. 21.
In front of us, performer Justine Chambers glided around the vast space in a pair of shimmering roller skates. She wore a white tank top and gray joggers with her wispy hair down, and she skated in a laissez-faire manner, pushing a bit and then letting the momentum take her until she slowed. At times, she found a wall and pressed against it with her hands, drifting backwards. Near the far southeast corner of the warehouse, sound designer and electronic musician Levy Lorenzo stood at a glowing table of technical equipment mixing music samples, including “Nipple to the Bottle” by Grace Jones. Songs swelled and retreated, like the momentum of Chambers’ skating, and sometimes glitched.
I noticed Knight was in the audience, helping to cue us to move around the space. Chambers rolled over toward the southeast corner, and Knight walked that direction as well, gesturing to the audience to follow. We gravitated towards them, settling into a seating arrangement that faced a large bed frame—the “stage” for the rest of tonight’s performance. To my surprise, a little aquarium of live fish was installed underneath the bed, a glowing underworld of life.
Chambers took off her skates and paused. She faced away from the audience toward an L-shaped formation of lights on the wall, gazing thoughtfully as one might gaze out a window. She turned to face us and began a jerky dance, reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s movement.
The bed’s headboard glowed orange, as Chambers mounted the bed and began grinding on a corner, which, I noticed, had been miked to pick up the sonic friction.
She danced an imaginative dance around and with the bed—a dance of boredom, restlessness, and irritation—emulating the psychic state of a sleepless night. The sound score played on, with clips from Ray Charles (singing the alphabet), Sade’s “Jezebel”, and Tupac’s “Dear Mama” and clips from the likes of Nina Simone and Frank Ocean and other Black musical artists.
Threading through this collage of songs ran an array of sound bites: drops of rain and splashing water, growls, video game sounds, a masculine voice speaking about lions, and another masculine voice speaking about children’s need for “attachment.”
A story of desire and loss emerged from all the bits and pieces of sound: lost sleep and dreams, lost love and partnership, even lost childhood and future.
Some fluorescent tube lights seemed to flicker in response to different moments of sound, in hues of orange, blue, and white elaborately orchestrated by lighting designer Tuce Yasak. All this created a sensory landscape that ebbed and flowed with peaks and valleys, marrying with Chambers’ antics.

Without my noticing at first, another body appeared on one side of the bed, performer Max Tyler-Hite, rustling softly and then growing still, face and form hidden beneath covers and sheets. Chambers turned to Tyler-Hite at times, as if desperate for attention, but could not bring herself to disturb this person—perhaps he was just a memory or a phantom haunting her.
Chambers danced with a furrowed brow that occasionally reminded me of a frustrated child exerting the most impatient patience. She poked her head through the bed’s headboard, slid her body across the top of it, and beat her pillow against the other side—emulating angst and rage with nowhere else to go.
She made her hand into a puppet and thrust it into the orange backlit section of the headboard. The puppet’s mouth roared, at once comically and unsettlingly, along with the sound score. She crouched against a wall with a pillow over her face, turning the pillow into another puppet, a fluffy babbling mouth.
Other times, she appeared agitated, like someone battling sleep disturbance due to hormone fluctuations. She gargled liquid, wrapped her head in a sheet, and moaned. She reached toward herself in a tall mirror in the corner of the space. Tyler-Hite remained indifferent all the while, even when she stood on the bed as if ready to step on his face.
Finally and suddenly, Tyler-Hite disappeared, falling into a hole in the bed. Chambers followed him downward, slowly pulling the comforter with her until everything on the surface of the bed stilled, like calm after a storm. Only gentle blue light and the sounds of splashing water remained, a womblike aura. Lights in the warehouse exhibition came up, and Knight, who had watched the whole performance with the audience, moved out of her seat and out into space. This was the conclusion. Jamire Williams’ “Pause in His Presence” played softly as we got up from our seats.
According to the show notes, Knight took inspiration from a conversation between Félix González-Torres and Hans Ulrich Obrist, during which “González-Torres discusses making art to confront his greatest fear of losing his partner, who later died of AIDS-related complications.”
In this light, NOTHING#15: a bed depicts how “doing nothing” opens space for rudimentary fear of loss to enter into consciousness, painting a picture of possibilities cut off from the future. Knight countered this hard prospect by creating a dreamy realm on a soft bed, ultimately dipping below the sharp right-angles of social reality into a fluid space where disparate thoughts, experience, and memories could grow more congruous.
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Note: Hannah Krafcik has been an artist-in-residence with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, their work has been presented by the organization on multiple occasions, and they retain supportive professional relationships with its leadership as an artists. Hannah offers this story about NOTHING#15: a bed from this perspective.*
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