EXHIBITION | CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY
ENTANGLED STRINGS | ON EXHIBIT AT THE NINA BLIESE GALLERY (MINNEAPOLIS) FROM NOVEMBER 12 2009 TO DECEMBER 18 2009
Entangled Strings is visual improvisation at the intersection of contemporary Western theoretical physics and the ancient Eastern contemplative science of meditation. Scientific method meets artistic license. For inspiration, Smaby used a methodology for intellectual inquiry favored by both ancient Buddhist monks and contemporary quantum physicists . Called thought experiment, the approach is ideal for pondering metaphysical phenomena that can neither be seen nor experimentally confirmed.
For his thought experiments, Smaby artfully blended three divergent and uniquely personal mind streams: his insightful understanding of contemporary science, his direct experience with meditation practices and his artistic gift for improvisation. Smaby previsualized how ordinary things might appear if the quantum uncertainty theorized by particle physicists at extremes of the infinitesimally tiny and unimaginably galactic were to prevail at the every-day macrocosmic scale we call reality.
His images explore how our perception of things might be altered if the ‘immutable’ laws of Newton and Einstein are indeed as impermanent and illusionary as professed by Buddhist scholars for millennia. While the show’s title is a conjunction formed from two mind-numbing theories in high-energy physics, it is the subliminal spiritual dimension that imbues Smaby’s evocatively abstract photographs with a luminous and mystical essence
"What really matters about matter is this tiny little matter of uncertainty." (GPS)