Two films that fundamentally changed my life, even if I didn’t know it at the time, were Back to the Future (1985) and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). As a child I became obsessed with time travel and from this physics—later growing up to read things like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988) and The Universe in a Nutshell (2001) as well as Douglas Adams’ comedy science fiction franchise The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In an oddly romantic way, this eventually led me down a path where I decided to major in philosophy at university so that I could undertake courses with titles such as ‘Time Travel’, ‘Metaphysics’, and ‘Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos’. This passion continues today through shows such as Rick and Morty, Dark, and Futurama, but also through my art—I have a strange fascination with movies and how they deceptively use still images to create an illusion of time and motion. For me, it is mesmerising that while we experience time as psychologically real, time is an illusion (or at least our perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality). In a very roundabout way, a lot of my art is about creating order out of the endless amounts of unrelated information swirling around, whether this is highlighting photography not as a tool to document and record reality but as a means to manipulate it, or simply trying to express that art is a response to the world—an attempt to capture an aspect of life as experienced by us—and is a catalyst for an ongoing open discussion and inquiry about the world.
Kailum Graves
