At PICA we recognise that we are situated within the unceded lands of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar Nation. We pay our respects and offer our gratitude to Elders past and present, and to those emerging leaders in the community. We acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the importance of their care and continued connection to culture, community and Country.

Always was, always will be.

Galleries are open today, 10am–5pm. Our exhibitions are always free.

Paul Knight

L’ombre de ton ombre (The shadow of your shadow)

L’ombre de ton ombre (The shadow of your shadow)

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. The first solo exhibition for Paul Knight in WA, it invokes the intimate present alongside the deep past and near future.

Knight’s ongoing photographic project Chamber Music is the centrepiece of the exhibition. It records the life he shares with his partner Peter since they met in 2009, and presents accumulated glimpses into the space of their relationship, creating these images with varying degrees of pre-meditation and chance.

Additionally, Knight’s hand-loomed textiles pursue the artist’s research into measures of time that are at once scientific and intimate. These highly-keyed abstractions employ the scale of a bed sheet to mediate the artist’s fascination with a hypothesis concerning the gravitational influence of a binary star system that triggered periodic meteor impacts on Earth. This event is geologically recorded as taking place sixty-five million years ago, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of mammals.

The exhibition celebrates Knight’s comfort in humanity being a subsequent organisation of matter, occupying but a slim chapter within deep geological time. The exhibition concludes with a new commission entitled Naked Souls, two chatbots whose machine learning comprises an archive of text messages from the first few years of Paul and Peter’s relationship and ruminates upon notions of love and survival. 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 that 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, art historian Professor Anthony Gardner, theoretical astrophysicist Dr Katie Mack, philosopher Oxana Timofeeva, and curators José Da Silva and Pip Wallis. 

Visitor information: This exhibition explores themes of sexual intimacy. It contains adult content including nudity and sexually explicit images and language. Viewer discretion is advised.  

About the artist

Paul Knight was born in Sydney and lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He has taken intimacy as his subject and considers its relationship to representation and the social designs that underpin its expression. Knight has been researching machine learning since 2018 to understand what chatbots might reveal about human consciousness and the role that intimacy and love play in evolution. With the support of a Samstag Scholarship, Knight completed a Master of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art in 2009. Recent exhibitions include Counterfeits at Neon Parc, Melbourne (2019) and Pliable Planes: Expanded Textile & Fibre Practices UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2022).
Paul Knight is represented by Neon Parc Gallery, Melbourne.  


Supporters

Paul Knight: L’ombre de ton ombre (The shadow of your shadow) is supported by PICA’s Art Commissioners and presented in partnership with Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Melbourne and UNSW Galleries, Sydney.