Quantum physics was needed to express the strange phenomena observed in sub-atomic particles that defied classical physics. Quantum time acknowledges the subjective experience of time, and the strange effects of synchronicity, multiplicity, association and memory on our experience of the world.

The urge to measure time and arrange the events of our lives into a chronologic order may seem instinctively rational. However, the mind has the propensity to cluster our memories of events according to other systems that exist outside of chronology. Being transported through time by a strain of music, a fragrance or an image that reminds us of a forgotten point in the past are examples of this. The duplication of material printed images and the mobility of multiples have increased the reach of ideas in space and time.

At the time of its creation, Roger Kemp’s large work Relativity (1972) was lauded by artist and art critic Jeffery Makin as “one of the most magnificent etchings in Australian print history”.1 Kemp’s print seeks to unify universal truths with the rhythmic structures of personal experience. The work’s circular motif is part of a visual vocabulary developed by Kemp in his efforts to reconcile science, metaphysics, and personal experience. Scientific theories such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that proposed that time itself could be distorted found contemplative expression in Kemp’s transcendental abstraction.

When William Hogarth’s satirical personification of time was printed in 1761, it was a contemporary statement intended to ridicule the imagined profundity that the passing of time might invest in an art object. As we peer into the picture frame (as Time himself is depicted as doing), we are aware of both a contemporary significance to the theme embodied by the material of an ageing art object and the suggestion of a hall of mirrors of picture frames and viewers.

(Blair Coffey Aug. 2019)

(1) Hendrik Kolenberg, Roger Kemp, and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Roger Kemp: The Complete Etchings (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1991), 12.

QUANTUM TIME