My 4th solo exhibition on Quantum Stories, Feb 1, 2008 @Kieth+Lottie Gallery, Perth, W.A

My new show, We'll Always Have Paris - bent tales from the sub-atomic is now open at Keith+Lottie Gallery, from January 17 to February 01, 2008. This is a very different show for me, stylistically I've drawn on my roots in design and merged my memories of early xerox graphic posters with historical (even classical?) imagery and merged them with stencils.

The exhibition is open 11am to 6pm daily (+weekends) at Keith and Lottie Gallery, 276 William St, Northbridge, Western Australia. Thanks to Seven Towns Ltd. for use of "Rubik's Cube (R)".

Artist Statement

In my 2006 exhibition Sedition and Other Bedtime Stories I began looking into the quantum world. I was seeking new ways of seeing old problems and, frankly, watching apples falling from trees was wearing pretty thin. Were we really destined to keep repeating our mistakes? In We’ll Always Have Paris – Bent Tales from the Sub-Atomic I began imagining if the road less traveled was actually possible? In fact, I wondered if I was walking that road in another reality while I was sitting on my studio floor in this one.

I started reading a lot about quantum physics, the history of physics, entanglement, many worlds, non-locality, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and, of course, deciding if Schrodinger's Cat was indeed alive or death – or both. Not being anywhere close to understanding the mathematics, and finding the visual and narrative analogies given in physics too brief, my artist-mind sought more familiar analogies for these concepts. This process was initially sparked by reading about Erwin Schrödinger’s notions of probability and superposition (his famous cat).

Einstein and his colleagues made quantum discoveries at the turn of the last century using ‘thought experiments’. To me, these experiments were not unlike fantasy stories and plays on word and logic. I could imagine similar conversations among students of Aristotle or Plato. Bringing my own interest in narratives theory to this subject, I became interested in using literary comparisons to continue this experiment. After all, I didn’t need to be Shakespeare to follow dead cats and falling apples into a world where everyone admitted that certainty was the greatest fiction of all.

So when reading about the ‘uncertainty principle’ or the ‘many worlds theory’ I was inspired by  stories that had shaken my idea of reality. That had included Wuthering Heights, the 1847 novel by Emily Brontë which I read in my Melbourne studio in 1989.  In this novel Brontë’s character Heathcliff (as the observer) is watching the two characters Catherine/Cathy (the subject) while trying to reconcile that one is alive and one is dead (like Schrödinger’s Cat). Like Heathcliff I too “fell out of time” and in complicity with Heathcliff, I left linear time for just an instance. A narrative forced me to either choose Heathcliff’s reality or say, “It’s only a novel” and return to my world. It was quite memorable and the idea stuck. What if a story was the real time machine? What if technology was secondary to the mind’s effect on physics? What a waste of all those toys.

For me, “falling out of time” was also falling out of the linear narrative. Aristotle and Newton just faded out.  Slowly it dawned on me that physicists weren’t telling different stories. They were just telling them in mathematics. So this all informed my painting We’ll Always Have Paris.  Paris in the sense of that imaginary literary destination which alternates between ingénue and slapstick.

In Shanghai Romance Cathy and Heathcliff have been ‘reborn’ as a Chinese couple re-enacting the possibilities of their failed romance in a bar in 1930s Shanghai. The image is composed of scans of hand cut stencils, and distorted images from an old movie poster and my own painting Cathy, Heathcliff, Cathy. By using repetition to rearrange the visual narrative into options – rather than the outcome of a well known story -  I have tried to evoke this feeling of ‘falling out of time’ that is needed to conceive of ‘many worlds’.

In my painting about Princess Diana’s public life and death in Paris -  Schrodinger's Requiem -  I looked at a very public narrative. Constructed from 16 individual 20 x 20cm stretched canvases that could be rearranged in any particular order. This is because quantum stories don’t have linearity; and the way we tell quantum stories are different. The idea of Paris became a thought experiment in this painting which asks the viewer to consider if Diana had escaped her death, where would she be and what would she be doing. Would she still be living in cars to Gary Numan’s lyrics: “Here in my car, I feel safest of all”?

In my Rubik’s Cube – Bette Noir – with graphic novel narratives printed on canvas onto wooden cubes I continued this play with non-locality. In France comics are as legitimate as the printed word. In 3 cubes I explore a story with multiple frames, non-linearity and im-probability. The pattern of each twist of the cube makes a new story. In this Rubik’s Cube, there is no final pattern to triumph over. There is only continual possibility.

The techniques for this exhibition evolved from my association with some graffiti artists who generously shared their aesthetic with me. On stretched canvases cut many stencils, sprayed with aerosol paint and painted over, under and in between with acrylic. Being more traditional with applying my paint, integrating the stencil and spray really stretched my technique. This reminded me a lot of the way I worked when I was doing band posters for punk musicians in the early 1980s. Those old Xerox posters had certain energy. In this series, the music I used was all from that era and at this point I began to use music as part of my process. When I think of this exhibition, I always think of Diana driving out of the tunnel.

Carl Gopalkrishnan

Media Release:
ATT: Artist Statement Carl Gopal

“We’ll Always Have Paris” - bent tales from the sub-atomic

@ Keith+Lottie Gallery
Jan17-Feb01, 2008

January 17th 2008

As I learnt more about quantum theory it occurred to me that we still use traditional laws of physics to describe things - our histories and identities. What if we erased those assumptions and read our stories with new laws, what would they look like?

Instead of using abstract ART - where the narrative is conspicuously absent – I focused on places in our culture where an uncertain universe might alter the beginning, middle or end of our stories and myths. 

I was especially interested in one interpretation – Many Worlds (or many universes)- and the role of the fictional imagination in creating alternative universes. Since the “beginning, middle and end” don’t have much meaning in quantum theory, I wanted to find different ways of describing time in my paintings.

In the quantum world you can’t be certain of anything and it’s more about the probability of something being somewhere or becoming something depending on who observes it. It’s almost anarchic, which is prime material for artists unrestrained by the natural world.

For example, in one set of paintings I look at the 1997 death of Princess Diana. In another, the fictional characters, Cathy-Heathcliff-Cathy from Emily Brontës’ novel Wuthering Heights bear an uncanny resemblance to the Schrödinger’s Cat story used to explain quantum theory.

I also re-imagined the 80s cult of the Rubiks Cube as a canvas on which the tapestry of life unfolds – but suggesting that statistical probability instead of conventional linear time drives the plot.

Using comics panels made me question what a story is supposed to look like. Is it imagination or is it statistical probability that decides what a story looks like? And does this mean that our imaginations are ruled by laws we are not aware of?

It’s always difficult to visualize ‘time’ in any meaningful way. I chose to ground the pictures in the cliché We’ll always have Paris, used by lovers to recover lost memory, feeling, imagination and a reference point to measure time in their life. 

I extended this to several paintings and placed the concept in different narratives in different times to re-read the idea of one timeline, one history, or one story of being human.

In the paintings I combined traditional painting with stencils, as the stencil is a tool of repetition and that conveys the idea of ‘many worlds’ quite well. Something about quantum theory is also very anarchic and (for me) I can see through the retro 80’s punk revival to those original Zerox cut-and-paste posters. I think I approached stencils a bit like the old Zerox art posters.

About Carl

Carl Gopalkrishnan has been exhibiting in Australia and the US since 1987. Trained in design, he is a self-taught painter working mainly in acrylic painting. Visit www.carlgopalkrishnan.com for full exhibition listing.

www.carlgopal.com

Keith+Lottie Gallery

276 william street
northbridge
western Australia
PH: +61-8-9328-8082
info@keithandlottie.com