Music Store Exhibition

‘Music Store’ by Olga Sophie Kauppinen 

18/12 - 30/12/2025

‘Music Store’ is an installation that takes the familiar architecture of a music shop and reimagines it as a microcosm of the universe—a site where intention, frequency, and choice become material. What appears at first glance as a commercial environment becomes a stage for ontological inquiry. Each guitar functions as an embodied frequency: a sculptural-painterly object that represents a possible dimension of experience. Together they create a condensed universe in which viewers navigate as active agents rather than passive observers.

The work draws on a long lineage of artists who merge object-hood with metaphysics—from Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz to the shaped surfaces of Ron Gorchov and Elizabeth Murray. These three-dimensional oil paintings extend this lineage by collapsing painting, sculpture, sound, and installation into a single operative system. 

The guitars, although sculptural, act as conceptual instruments. By selecting which “frequency” to engage with, the viewer reenacts the creative mechanism that shapes lived experience.

This installation is a practical representation of a process described both in ancient spiritual teachings and contemporary quantum theory: reality as a field of pre-existing potentials that unfold according to attention and intention. Within the installation, sound, material, and symbol coalesce. The viewer becomes the “operant power,” selecting from multiple timelines, experiences, and narratives already present in latent form. Much like in quantum physics, the worlds exist simultaneously; the act of choosing determines the one that unfolds. The Metaphysical Music Store becomes a capsule-sized universe where agency is foregrounded—an echo of the choices that structure human life.

‘Music Store’ transforms the setting of a guitar shop into a small, self-contained universe where multiple timelines and possibilities exist at once. Each sculptural painting is paired with an original song, creating a distinct world with its own mood, frequency, and narrative trajectory. The installation uses the familiar structure of a shop as a deliberate illusion, inviting viewers into a space that looks commercial but operates as a field of parallel realities. By choosing which piece—and which song—to engage with, visitors enact a quantum-like decision, selecting one possible path out of many. ‘Music Store’ functions both as a microcosm and an illusion, reflecting how perception and choice shape the realities we step into.