Paul Knight: L’ombre de ton ombre
- When 7 Oct - 9 Dec 2023
- Where
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Address
Building F, Monash University, Caulfield campus, 900 Princes Hwy Service Rd, Caulfield East VIC 3145
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Phone
(03) 9905 4217
Perhaps the most complex and entangled of all human processing and response is the data generated by human love. – Paul Knight
‘L’ombre de ton ombre (The shadow of your shadow)’ is the first major exhibition of the work of Paul Knight in Australia. Co-commissioned by UNSW Galleries and Monash University Art Museum, Melbourne this exhibition presents new and recent photographic, sculptural and machine learning works that engage the artist’s relationship with his partner as an index of time, invoking the intimate present alongside the deep past and near future.
Knight’s ongoing photographic project, Chamber Music, records the life he shares with his partner Peter. 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 so that it simply captures what it sees. While the artist’s relationship provides the material for Chamber Music, Knight’s hand-loomed bedsheets weave other stories into their fabric.
Pursuing research into various measures of time, both scientific and narrative, Knight is fascinated by the hypothesis concerning the gravitational influence of a binary star system that triggered periodic meteor impacts on Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and rise of mammals. Geologically this event is recorded in the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary as taking place sixty-five million years ago and Knight takes comfort in humanity being simply another subsequent organisation of matter occupying only a slim chapter of this deep geological time. His textile works reference, through their combination of minimal colour and abstract compositions, the atmosphere of a binary star system and the conceptually and physically intimate measure between two bodies.
Alongside these photographic works and textile installations, Knight’s work Naked Souls, co-commissioned by MUMA, UNSW Galleries and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts engages machine learning technology to unfold a conversation between two chatbots in the gallery. Trained with a pre-existing archive consisting of every text message sent between the artist and his partner Peter in the first few years of their relationship, visitors will witness the bots communicating with each other for the duration of the exhibition—their dialogue evolving from the raw material of banal ‘everyday’ exchanges to the intensity of a forming relationship with its hunger for real physical contact. As Knight says, ‘perhaps the most complex and entangled of all human processing and response is the data generated by human love.’
The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph which illustrates Knight’s Chamber Music series and details the algorithmic working methods of his textiles and machine learning works included in ‘L’ombre de ton ombre’. The book is co-published by MUMA, UNSW Galleries and Perimeter Books and includes new texts by the artist, Anthony Gardner, Katie Mack, Oxana Timofeeva, José Da Silva and Pip Wallis.
As part of the exhibition Knight has produced a limited-edition print, Savanna 2023, which belongs to Chamber Music, now available for purchase online. Proceeds from the sale of this edition will support this first museum survey of Knight’s practice.
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‘Paul Knight: L'ombre de ton ombre’ is co-commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art | Melbourne where the exhibition takes place 7 October – 9 December 2023 and will tour to Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 26 October 2024 – 19 January 2025. The exhibition features new works supported by the UNSW Galleries Commissioners Circle and MUMA Contemporaries. Publication produced with the support of Neon Parc, Melbourne.
This exhibition explores themes of sexual intimacy. Please be advised that it contains adult content including nudity and sexually explicit images and language. Viewer discretion is advised. For further information, please contact UNSW Galleries.




Image: Paul Knight, Untitled (Chamber Music) 2009–, Monash University Collection, Melbourne
Installation Images: Installation view, P'aul Knight: L'ombre de ton ombre', Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne, 2023. Photo: Christian Capurro