Lindsay Seers

Rugby Collection | Rugby Art Gallery and Museum

22 March - 28 August 2011 2011

Rugby Art Gallery

Materials: 2 video works for monitors with headphones,  2 plinths and a bench, I video projection with surround sound and subwoofer  (all videos to be screened together), 12, 13 and 14 minutes duration, looped. Fabric tent on a wooden structure, fabric screen on a wooden frame.

Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Collection

Extramission 2 (The Trilogy), 2005/10 – The World of Jule Eisenbud; Intermission; Extramission 2

Extramission 2
The final film in the trilogy covers Seer’s attempts to become a projector. This seems to be the answer to her problems of living life as a camera. Her return to Mauritius with her mother, to find a missing house from her childhood, raises questions about the stability of memory and the impossibility of fully understanding the past. Her idea to give up the past brings on her activities as a projector – to move forwards in time emanating light.

The World of Jule Eisenbud
Lindsay Seers’ attempt to become a camera is linked to the curious life of Ted Serios, a psychic performer who claimed to be able to create photographic images solely by ‘projecting his thoughts’ onto film. The narrator is identified as Rufus Eisenbud, son of Dr Jule Eisenbud, the psychologist who investigated and documented the abilities of Ted Serios in the 1 960s. We are told that Dr Eisenbud met Lindsay Seers in Amsterdam and was struck by the consonance between the odd distortions and imperfections of Serios’ so-called thou photographs and the mouth-photographs being created by the artist. Unravelling the reasons for Seers’ obsessive practices becomes an obsession for Dr Eisenbud.

Intermission
The second film of the series begins with a sight gag: the first in a series of delightful absurdities appropriate to the vaudevillian turn in the artist’s work. An unseen narrator, theatre director and performance artist Steve Pearl begins a monologue about dreams. But the first ‘talking head’ we see is Bill, Seers’ principal dummy, lip-synching to Pearl’s speech. Bill has no operator we can see. Indeed, there are no conventional scenes of a human operator with dummy sat on lap, only a memorable inversion of this relationship in which Seers appears to climb up onto the lap of an enormous dummy. When Steve Pearl eventually makes his own appearance, we cannot help wondering who is putting the words in his mouth.