Lindsay Seers

Sphere | Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, Canada

13 September - 2 November 2003

Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, Canada

Materials: framed R-Type photographs mounted on aluminium.

Excerpt from: Lindsay Seers' 'We saw you coming'; 20,000 leagues Under the Sea, Apollo 13 and '2001'. Author: Lisa Panting.

Beyond the innumerable resources of science, Verne invented an excellent novelistic device in order to make more vivid this appropriation of the world: to pledge space by means of time, constantly to unite these two categories, to stake them on a single throw of the dice or  a single impulse… Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Suspended in the void between old and new, past and future, man is projected into time as into something alien that incessantly eludes him and still drags him forward, but without allowing him to find his ground in it.

Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content
 

Borrowing words from a distant text is one way artist's and writers register both their admiration for the original and their trust the appropriation will catalyze new syntheses in the minds of viewers and readers. That this borrowing is on one level metaphorically violent is re-dressed by giving the borrowed words a moment of present-ness. Artists appropriations often purloin the requisite minimum material with little reverence for the original source. Lindsay Seers' work unwinds like a set of quotations, building not only from external references, but in this case quoting herself as well. Seers has that Verne-like ability " to…pledge space by means of time" that Barthes identifies as a " novelistic device"; in We Saw You Coming it emerges through the shutter of the lens. [Click the link below to read the full text]

Sphere_invitation.pdf

Sphere_full text by lisa_panting.pdf