Exhibition Description:

In her new installation, Understory, Erika Knerr transforms the Art Kiosk in Redwood City into a suspended, layered rainforest environment that draws on her early mural work for the Tropical Zone of New York’s Central Park Zoo in the 1980s. Reengaging imagery first created for the zoo’s 1988 renovation—which reframed the institution around research, conservation, education, and wildlife advocacy—Knerr revisits the illusion of tropical abundance once painted inside a constructed rainforest in the middle of the city. The Art Kiosk, an enclosed glass space, reads like a greenhouse or a display enclosure depicting a natural habitat. Here Knerr translates those original tropical murals onto muslin and sheer fabric. The installation is composed of airbrushed translucent panels, overlapping silhouettes, and fragments of foliage that hang in layers, creating a rainforest that can only be approached from the outside. The installation is visible only through the Kiosk’s windows, positioning the public once again at the glass, looking into a carefully painted ecosystem that never grants full entry.

Knerr’s painting process infuses the installation with a ghostly, veil-like atmosphere that shifts between day and night. Working on absorbent, earthy muslin, she builds up an underpainting using large batches of coffee ink. This is coffee made into ink with a simple recipe and was collected in collaboration with a local independent grocery store that donated its end-of-day coffee, connecting the work to cycles of consumption and sustainability. Over this coffee-stained ground, she airbrushes the rainforest murals, echoing the trompe l’oeil techniques she employed decades earlier with a paint sprayer in the Central Park Zoo’s Tropical Zone.

Originally conceived as backdrops for captive understory creatures, murals were part of a larger immersive illusion that shaped how viewers understood animals, climate, and environment. In Understory, this history is brought forward and critically reframed. By echoing the zoo’s logic of containment—where both animals and imagery are displayed for human viewing—the installation raises questions about captivity, visibility, and who controls the frame. It invites viewers to see their own reflections layered over the transplanted rainforest and to consider what might be learned from nonhuman life and from pre-anthropocentric rainforests that exist with or without us in a biodiverse interdependence.

Understory positions the Art Kiosk as both a site of looking and a metaphorical enclosure, asking visitors to pause at the threshold and confront the uneasy boundaries between spectacle, care, and control in our relationships with the more-than-human world.

About the Artist:

Erika Knerr is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculptural installations, printmaking, murals, performance, and graphic design. Her artistic research explores emotion and its relationship to the human body and the nonhuman environment, drawing on personal yet universal experiences of fertility, grief, longing, and transformation. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and based in Florence, Massachusetts, she creates work that bridges interior emotional states with material form.

In 2026, Knerr will attend a residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy. She was a 2024 fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). Knerr was a member of Zea Mays Printmaking Studio in Northampton, MA (2012–2022), and her installation Gemstones and Chakra Tools was permanently installed at 1440 Multiversity in Scotts Valley, California, in 2017 through Fung Collaboratives. Her Sun Portraits were shown at Prak-Sis Gallery in Chicago (2016) and she performed in the SWITCH intermedia art series for public access TV in Holyoke, MA (2009–2016). Her work has been exhibited in solo, two-person, and group shows and festivals internationally.

Earlier in her career, she was a principal artist with Lance Fung Gallery in New York (1998–2003). She was a member of the International Artists Museum in Łódź, Poland participating in Site-ations International in Cardiff, Wales (1994), Construction in Process in Israel (1995) and Cambio Constante, Zaragoza, Spain (2004). She attended the SVA Abroad Masters Workshop in Design History, Theory, and Practice in Rome and Venice in 2011, and earned her BFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

About the Art Kiosk:

Since 2019, the Art Kiosk aims to bring thought-provoking installations and public art to Redwood City and the Bay Area through eight, six week-long exhibitions throughout each year. Artists from the Bay Area and around the world have been invited to realize their ambitious, site-specific artworks for our audience to enjoy. The initiative was conceived and is curated by Lance M. Fung. Donated curatorial work and project management for the exhibition series is provided by Fung Collaboratives. The Redwood City Improvement Association (RCIA) is the sole sponsor since the inaugural year. Redwood City acts as the logistical partner and provides the space and utilities. Please drop by for a visit 24/7 at 2208 Broadway, Redwood City, CA for a free viewing. Details may be found at: www.fungcollaboratives.com