Paul Knight: L’ombre de ton ombre

‘Paul Knight: L’ombre de ton ombre (The shadow of your shadow)’ presents new and recent photographic, textile and machine learning works that employ the artist’s relationship with his partner as an index of time, invoking the intimate present alongside the deep past and near future. The first museum exhibition of the work of Paul Knight in Australia, 'L’ombre de ton ombre' has been co-commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne.

Knight’s ongoing photographic project, Chamber Music, which records the life he shares with his partner Peter, is the heart of this exhibition. Since they met in 2009, the series has accumulated glimpses into the domestic space of their relationship, with its images created through varying degrees of pre-meditation and chance; often, the camera timer is set to capture what it simply sees. Beyond their narrative content, however, the images also speak to the nature and function of photography itself.

While the artist’s relationship provides the material for Chamber Music, Knight’s hand-loomed bedsheets depart from the artist’s research into evolution and the role of love in human consciousness. Fascinated by cosmological dynamics from the meteor impacts on Earth—hypothesised to have subsequently led to the extinction of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals—to the gravitational forces of binary star systems, Knight’s abstract textile compositions link these major astronomical events with their striking human consequences: from life-enabling protection of the atmosphere, to intimacy between bodies.

'L’ombre de ton ombre' also includes a new project involving a conversation between two chatbots. Trained with a pre-existing archive of text messages from the first few years of the artist’s and Peter’s relationship, as well as dialogue from science fiction novels, the chatbots will pursue an exchange that ruminates upon the deep physicality of love and notions of survival.

Engaging the complex ‘data’ generated by human love, 'L’ombre de ton ombre' meditates on immediate and vast scales of time, the meaning of consciousness with its ‘by-product’ of love, and acts of witnessing—both intimate and universal.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial publication that brings artistic and scientific perspectives into conversation with Knight’s evolving practice, co-published by MUMA, UNSW Galleries and Perimeter Editions.

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Presented in partnership with Monash University Museum of Art | Melbourne where the exhibition takes place 7 October – 9 December 2023. The exhibition features new works supported by the UNSW Galleries Commissioners Circle and MUMA Contemporaries. Publication produced with the support of Neon Parc, Melbourne. 

 

Image: Paul Knight, Untitled (Chamber Music) 2009–, Monash University Collection, Melbourne.