Lindsay Seers It has to be this way 21 January–15 March 2009

Press Information
I could say that I was in love with her, but it was not in an ordinary sense. I was consumed by her, so that it became painful. I wanted to merge with her entirely, to become her. After the accident the nature of this intense connection with her became much more dangerous for me, as if the things had become polarised and the differences between us became more erratic - swinging violently between attraction and repulsion…
In the years and months preceding It has to be this way, Lindsay Seers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, a catastrophic accident has caused a chain of events that take us on a journey through history where everything is connected.
In a recent visit to Stockholm, the artist photographed anything that was associated with her step-sister, Christine, and followed streams of associations and connections attempting to reconstruct a past in which characters move across history and slip from one person to another. Within the gallery, a viewing chamber forms part of a sculptural installation housing a double-screen video projection and two monitor works that use several characters to stage the differences between renaissance and modern thought on art, philosophy and science.
Drawing on historical theories of vision, Seers creates highly personal narratives by interweaving concepts of science, philosophy and photographic theory into the work, in an ongoing investigation into how cinematic and photographic technologies shape us. These narratives are punctuated by incredible plot devices – stalkings, burglaries, shipwrecks – that mimic the rupture at the heart of image production, creating a dramatisation of selfhood in all its melancholy and failure. By re-casting photography as an act that actually creates experiences rather than records them, or as David Burrows describes it in Human Camera, by creating ‘an indexical process that is transformative’, the boundaries of photography in Seers’ work are truly extended.
The opening paragraph is an extract from a novel concerning Christine Parkes, Seers and a character known only as S. In 1999 Christine was involved in an accident that left her with severe retrograde and anterior grade memory loss. She went missing in Rome in 2001.


 

Weaving fiction in reality