ASK Dee’s Irish mother – who was a periodic artists model and domestic worker – had dalliances with both men. She did not know which man was the father of AK Dee, her only child. They were put up for adoption, and raised by Jesuits in Edinburgh. When AK Dee was young, living in London, they met and befriended their mother about a year before she died. Their mother’s anglicized name was Jane Weston. The real family name was Byrne, from county Cork. After running away from Ireland to London as a teenager, Knobe Dee’s mother never returned. She was never married.

Education

AK Dee studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology during the end of the Mies van Der Rohe era. It was during the latter years at architecture school where AK Dee started to become disillusioned with the heroic Modern architectural project, and where AK Dee was first exposed to Dada and Surrealism, collage and assemblage works, the writings of Artaud, Beckett and Camus.

Knobe Dee left Chicago for Detroit in the mid 1950s, then further east, to New York and Connecticut. AK Dee spent much of the 60s and early 70s in New York. Moving in circles with the likes of George Brecht, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Maciunas, Robert Rauschenberg, Gordon Matta-Clarke, and a young Patti Smith. AK Dee was aware of and influenced by John Cage’s “Experimental Composition” classes at The New School. They were known to be inspired on hearing of and seeing the published Iannis Xenakis designed Phillips pavilion in Expo ’58 with his musique concrète Concret PH .

Knobe Dee also spent time in Toronto in the 60s and 70s, where they were known to have befriended and collaborated with R Murray Schafer and Glen Gould. (AK Dee was introduced to Glenn Gould in 1966, where they compared notes on the virtual potential of radio technology.) Knobe Dee remained lifetime friends with Frank Gehry and one of their mentors, the Canadian architect & humanitarian Hazen Sise. Knobe Dee returned to Detroit in the late 80s, creating numerous large works. There is sparse documentation for most of these works.

There is evidence of Knobe Dee being variously in Vancouver, Seattle, then LA (it was said that it was Knobe Dee works and conversations that inspired Gehry’s radical house renovation), San Francisco, New Orleans, back to NY, Montreal and ultimately settling in Newfoundland.

Pseudonym

AK Dee describes their pseudonym persona as a “hand-me-down one person art collective”.

“All my life, I’ve been trying to make sense of my family history, my family legacy. Even though amazing technicians, with superlative facility, my artist ancestors public subject choices and creative interests are pre-Modern and Victorian in attitude and output. (Though RBTK did do interesting things with folded paper.) Their incuriosity was curious to me, as art and literature was going through revolutions during their lives. As well, their identification as British, while downplaying their Irish roots, seemed predictable and intellectually lazy. Even disingenuous. I wanted my work to stand on its own, unencumbered by my identity or lineage….”

Knobe Dee’s first known installation work, done while a student, Roll Boat Dirge, was located in the historical Mecca Flats apartment prior to its demolition.

Their silent presence was appreciated by many. Including Joseph Beuys’ who deployed him as the security/docent for his New York “social sculpture” work, Coyote. And John Cage, whom he accompanied to Toronto in 1968 where he played a game of musical chess, Reunion, on a stage against an unsuspecting Marcel Duchamp.

AK Dee’s is a critical practice. Many of AK Dee’s works might be interpreted as absurdly discursive, even negations, about subtraction, pointlessness, “being in the way”. The works are messy, inconvenient. Architecture’s inextricable relationship to private and public space, urban development, public and personal decay are common mediums and subject matter. AK Dee plays with Fluxus and Neo-Dada concepts, working with George Brecht’s notion of arranging “event-objects”, oftentimes taking them from the intimate to the scale of the city. Often comprising works that emphasized time and intending to provoke an immediate response, many of these works could be manipulated by the viewer in various ways, revealing associated phenomena, like sounds, tactile textures and even smells. AK Dee considers the various works as iterations of “mobile labs, measuring the phenomenological footprints of space”. By destructuring existing sites, AK Dee seeks to reveal the tyranny as well as opportunity of urban enclosure, critiquing our “Machine Living” and the Absurdly ever-present paradoxical desire for permanence.

Unlike Matta-Clarke, who was interested in exploring new ideas of form and space in the midst of existing urban decay, misunderstanding critics of AK Dee say AK Dee has contributed to, even catalyzed, urban decay.

In a break with convention and adding further intrigue to AK Dee’s oeuvre is that none of the confirmed Knobe Dee works are for sale, and little is confirmed to be in private or public collections.