Parallel Narratives

Although it is commonplace to speak of the spatial arts, painting and sculpture, as narrative arts—a way of speaking which suggests the intimate relations between image and text—pictorial artists obviously do not narrate stories in the same way that writers do. In a certain sense, they do not narrate at all. To speak of an artist as a teller of stories is a figure of speech, since painters and sculptors do not “tell,” they “show.” As some critics have observed, pictorial artists imply a narrative by referring to what has been said in words, but surely such allusions are not the same thing as a narrative in words. -BAROLSKY, PAUL. "There is No Such Thing as Narrative Art." Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, vol. 18 no. 2, 2010, p. 49-62. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/arn.2010.0007. As Paul Barolsky explains, artworks “show” stories compared to telling a story as a novelist would do. The sculptures and paintings in this group show offer a visual representation of thoughts, reflections and ideas and compose a story to be perceived visually and transformed intellectually. Demonstrating how we perceive art and are exposed to visual narratives, woven by the artists, investigating thoughts and individual perception. The exhibition takes its title from the term Parallel Narratives, coined by Peter Sloterdijk, describing the phenomena of images offering a spatial and visual “parallel narrative” to his intellectual exploration of bubbles (discovery of self). Each work in the show represents its own narrative, juxtaposing a new story, evoking different thoughts and creating a temporary chronicle in the space. Simultaneously creating parallels to the other works, sometimes in coherence, sometimes in juxtaposition, offering an investigation into space, self, intimacy and correlation. Walking through the exhibition can be seen as a continuous narrative, weaved by each visitor, closing gaps between memory and reality, between thought and creation, highlighting the capacity of objects in a space to construct a dialogue with one another.