BOB BICKNELL-KNIGHT

Water Spiders, 2021
Ink and acrylic on canvas
58 x 58 cm

Water Spiders (2021) is part of a body of work by Bob Bicknell-Knight exploring Amazon warehouses and Amazon’s relationship to its human employees, including paintings, sculptures and video.

Within the project Bicknell-Knight has produced a number of paintings depicting Amazon workers and their warehouse jobs. Amazon employees, loosely dubbed Amazonians, spend countless hours within Amazon warehouses undergoing a variety of different jobs that will soon be automated, replaced by artificially intelligent machines. Human workers are already being treated as if they are machines within these warehouse environments, with timed bathroom breaks and constant surveillance. Their job titles, ranging from Picker to Water Spider, detail what menial, physically demanding and incredibly repetitive activity they’ll be undergoing on a daily basis, from picking up and scanning products to wrapping pallets. These employees are aware of their precarious position but, as Amazon continues to dominate global markets, it’s increasingly difficult to find work within this industry and to not be treated like an emotionless machine. Bicknell-Knight’s paintings detail the insides of Amazon warehouses, working from photos released to global news outlets alongside tours of Amazon facilities, as a vehicle for speaking about automation, forms of hyper-capitalism and unstable warehouse environments.

The works are hybrid paintings, beginning as photos found online, which are subsequently edited and then printed onto canvas, stretched and painted onto with acrylic paint, with the offline artist’s hand interacting with the original digital image. The painting method explores the tension between the digital and physical sides of Bicknell-Knight’s practice and is a collaboration between his digital and physical working methods.

Water Spiders has been included in the following exhibitions:

– It’s Always Day One. At Office Impart, Berlin, DE, 22nd April – 6th June 2021.

Water Spiders is part of a private collection.