In 2023, Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA is proud to present the first major exhibition of the work of Paul Knight in Australia. Co-commissioned by MUMA and UNSW Galleries, Sydney, where the exhibition will tour in early 2024, Paul Knight: L’ombre de ton ombre (The shadow of your shadow) presents new and recent photographic, sculptural 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.

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. The exhibition at MUMA brings together two large-scale prints from this series in the Monash University Collection with more recent additions.

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 has become fascinated with 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 the 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 is developing a new project based on machine learning technology that will unfold in the gallery as a conversation between two chatbots. 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 future represented here by artificial intelligence is countered throughout the exhibition with markers of care and human touch, including a new series of sculptures cast from the artist’s and Peter’s ears in Libyan desert glass, an impactite formed by the energy of meteors hitting the Earth roughly twenty-eight million years ago. Together, these new and recent works meditate on microscopic and macroscopic scales of time and witnessing—both intimate and universal in scale.

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

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