The works in this exhibition represent an effort to explore some of the deeply counterintuitive ideas in contemporary physics, particularly as they relate to ourselves as embodied subjects. Since it is impossible to directly represent ideas such as relativistic space-time, or the many extra spatial dimensions in string theory, it is necessary to hint at them using various visual strategies, thus drawing on the familiar to extend the imagination into unfamiliar territory. More important to me is the sense of disorientation and dislocation that these ideas can induce.

Most visual art – often even when highly abstract – retains a sense of conventional space and time, certain assumptions about materiality, and the comfortably familiar sense of inhabiting terrestrial space as we are accustomed to seeing it. The world as it is has no respect for our metal handrails such as solidity, simultaneity, horizontality and verticality. The sense of uncanniness and dislocation that we feel when considering a world without these handrails is my starting point. (Caspar Fairhall 2008)