Lindsay Seers

Care(less) | Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

15- 23 January 2020

1 Oozells Square, Brindleyplace, Birmingham B1 2HS

You could have entered a low lit space either in a castle dungeon in Lincoln, a deconsecrated church in Brighton or in a hidden room in Birmingham. Inside these rooms there is a shadow play of silhouettes that are blown around the walls, looming and shrinking like a phantasmagoria or Plato’s cave. Some medical swivelling stools are placed around an abstract geometric form. The viewers occupy these stools and are immersed in a 360 world that leads them through past, present and future
This work addresses neurodiversity, hallucination and embodied viewing in relation to our current social and economic constructs regarding attitudes to the elderly and social care in Britain. It is also concerned with the hallucinatory condition of filmic mediums (here specifically Virtual Reality) which feel closer to how the mind itself works rather than how this is conveyed in historic film mediums. Alongside the medium the work questions the dubious cultural conventions/constructs we live by and their incoherence. As an editing method it follows the fragmentation of consciousness as opposed to the usual narrative constructs derived from literature/main stream cinema. Care(less) steps back into what underpins identity politics to address its true substrate – human consciousness in this case struggling to make sense of a subject that is almost impossible to conceive of – death. In the 360° perspective the journey through the work will inevitably change each time for each person, as the mind finds differing narratives embedded in the visual perspectives. The embodiment that comes with VR (a potentially dangerous medium which has been aligned with addiction) evokes an odd sense of reality that makes real the virtual.  This will may be like nothing you have seen in VR before…

The work features an asymmetric geometric form from Durer that seems to be the geometry of melancholy. The etching was made after Durer watched the painful death of his mother in 1514, about which he said he could find no words to express his grief.

 

Materials: VR Headsets  x 6 with headphones, wall paintings, shadow lamps, medical swivel stools x 6, drawings x 6 and sunflower heads.