Drive Thru
Carlos Knight
Carlos Knight’s ‘Drive Thru’, an overscaled replica of litter, draws our attention to the accidental compositions in shared urban environments created by the vestiges of human presence.
Enclosed in Window Gallery’s glass display inside the Library Foyer, Drive Thru stages an encounter with the overlooked. Its enlarged scale compels attention to the familiar and otherwise unremarkable form of the KFC takeaway bag, while quietly turning focus back towards the gallery as a banal container, a device in framing the observed and unseen. This mode of noticing Drive Thru intentionally repeats the moment of discovery that underpins the origins of the artwork and Knights practice itself – the findings of sculptural potential in our daily life, in passing, and often without intention. Everyday objects such as litter operate as a material index of place, traces of movement through the cumulative effects of human interaction, discard, and re-use. Here, Drive Thru, installed in Window Gallery, transforms the object into something held, still, and resonant. A transient moment of noticing sculptural potential is realised.
Drive Thru also serves as a continuation of Knights large scale litter replicas - In 2023, Knight produced Supersize Me (McReady Combo).
Carlos Knight is a Pākehā New Zealand born artist, based in Ōutatahi, Christchurch. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts with First-Class Honours at Toi Rauwhārangi, Massey University, Wellington, Te Whanganui-a-Tara. During this time, he received the Collin Post Memorial Scholarship in Sculpture. His practice responds to the sculptural potential within the shared urban and domestic environments that he moves through daily, allowing found materials and human traces to steer him. He acts on moments when form and function misalign: a piece of litter stranded in a street gutter, a mattress gradually collapsing over a suburban fence, or an umbrella destroyed by wind and abandoned on the sidewalk.
His recent exhibitions include his solo show Traffic Island (Twenty Six Gallery, 2025) and group exhibitions My Landlord Doesn't Know I Have A Dog (Level 1, 107 Cuba Street, 2025), Floracion de Corazon: A Karanga To Mexico (The Engine Room, 2025), Teeth and Nails (113 The Parade, 2025), and Looking at the curb (The Engine Room, 2024).
1 July - 12 August 2026