Kneer has been obsessed with The Picture of Dorian Gray since first reading it at the beginning of the proverbial pandemic, and points toward Wilde’s dictum that, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” as a mantra in the creation of his new works. Wilde continues, “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” And, perhaps more importantly, “Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.” Kneer is frustrated by contemporary art’s refusal to uphold what he sees as the point of all art production: ”The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless,” Wilde says. In invoking Wilde’s text, Kneer may be suggesting that art’s true worth lies in being useless up until the point that it offers pure distraction from existing realities. Instead, artists follow the path laid out for them in their MFA programs: they offer their creativity up in service of ideological and moral agendas. What Kneer is trying to do then is to instrumentalize the signifiers of cinema and pop culture to extract from them their innate human sentiment as well as their abilities to transport us out of banal reality and into a head space of, for lack of a better term, magic.

Movie magic, of course, is a form of magic that the vast majority of us identify with. It is that magic–the occult energy that courses through the cinematic experience that envelops the senses in a melange of contradictory feelings and thoughts–that Kneer channels to animate his most recent series of monochrome printed silver mirrors with custom-made galvanized “movie” flip frames. The series uses the provocative title of BASTARDS, and the artist has broken down this new body of work into sequential chapters. The first of those BASTARDS ­(NEVERLAND), was displayed as a solo exhibition at Shore Gallery earlier this year. In this context, “Bastards” makes me think of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who adopted his moniker out of the conviction that “there was no father to his style.” “Neverland,” on the other hand, yields associations of Michael Jackson and the Peter Pan Syndrome. Perhaps what Kneer wants us to see is a form of art devoid of any paternal structure prescribed by the art world, allowing us to relish in sensations of freedom and youth.