Time and space have entered human consciousness as two of the most imperative realities, and yet we have never quite understood them. Some of the most profound philosophical questions have concerned the nature of time and space. What are they, and have they always existed? If not, what was in their place before they existed? Are they constant or relational? Do they connect with each other or are they separate? Do we exist within them or they within us? Can there be empty space or time in which nothing happens? Do past events and vacated spaces still exist?
St Augustine (c420) was the first to think about these questions in a logical, 'modernist' way. He wanted to know whether or not time had existed before the creation of the universe, and if so, what was God doing with it. Stephen Hawking suggest that he was creating Hell for people who asked too many questions! Augustine's answer was that God must have created time and the universe simultaneously.
For Isaac Newton (c1680) space and time were external realities, existing in the physical world, and they were constant. Therefore, they could be measured and described. Time was thought to be progressive and evolutionary, moving forward like an arrow. Space was thought to be a physical entity with shape and extension.
Around 1900 there emerged two people with more questions - Freud and Einstein. In his work on dreams and the unconscious Freud proposed that not all time was external and physical. He believed that memories, dreams and visions were also real, but not in a conscious or physical sense. They also occupied the time and space, but not progressive time or material space, because they behaved quite differently from entities that existed in these dimensions.
In 1907 Henri Bergson wrote a work called Creation and Duration. In this he differentiated between what he called 'clock time' and creative time. Creative time is that personal time of memories, dreams and visions, and to Bergson it was more real than clock time. According to Bergson Clock time is irrelevant to the creative act. When an artist creates an image in his/her soul, time is not an 'accessory'. The act of creation is not a process that can be measured in terms of space or time.
In his Interpretation of Dreams Freud describes dreams as working through condensation, transference and displacement. Condensation describes the way in which images combine or overlap, so that space is compressed. In dreams time is also compressed. We can dream a great deal in what seems to be a very short time. Transference means that dream images relate to each other indirectly. They slip and slide in all directions, their connections existing mainly at the level of the unconscious. Displacement is a process in which images constantly replace one another, as associations are formed and reformed across time a space.
Gosia Sarnecka's drawings can best be described as employing these three techniques of condensation, transference and displacement. In Evening with Fruit for example, the fruit seems to extend over most of the picture plane. Yet, its extension is disrupted by a system of horizontal lines, which cause it to 'fold' backwards and forwards. In this way it relates to a completed picture on a wall behind, a jar of brushed near the centre and to a pen together with a work in progress in the foreground. Thus, the fruit, while occupying it own spatial and temporal planes, also signifies past, present and future creative acts simultaneously.
The effect of multiple planes and simultaneous significance is reinforced by means of fine line work. The lines, while forming images and contours also form spaces between the images. This allows images to superimpose themselves over other images, creating the effect of a series of visual 'transparencies'.
In SBS News there are three areas or spaces. Two seated figures occupy a 'central' space. They are watching a television set, which occupies another space, and behind them there is a third space. The three spaces seem at first to be separate, but they are brought together by the two figures. Through these figures the distant spaces appearing on the television are transferred into their space and on into the seemingly empty space of the lounge room behind. By this process, occupied space, distant space and vacant space, are all brought into coexistence. Different events are also overlapped and displaced, so that time is condensed. The events on the television screen have already taken place but they are also currently taking place in the minds of the two viewers, and may in the future have an influence on what is to take place in the 'empty' space of the room.
Times and spaces are constantly traversed and combined by means of everyday images being placed in unusual juxtapositions and relationships. Because these images are represented in contour and in space, without solidity, they occupy multiple spaces and create many events in different times. In postmodernist style no single space or event precedes or dominates over the others. They defy narrative sequence by occupying a multiplicity of superimposed planes, and they defy dimensionality and spatial extension by creating an effect of transparency, allowing the viewer to experience different objects occupying the same space at the same time.