Lindsay Seers

Swallowing Black Maria | Smart Project Space, Amsterdam

14 July - 18 August 2007 2007

Smart Project Space, Amsterdam

Materials: 2 screen synchronised DVD projection with surround sound; wooden and cardboard structure with DVD projection and 3 channel sound, monitor DVD work on headphones, ventriloquist's dummy with electronics and cameras, series of photographs.

Excerpt from: Richard Grayson's text in Smart Paper ‘Swallowing Black Maria’

Seers’ recent interest in Thomas Edison’s first film studio continues a path of convergence. The building constructed in 1893 was known as the Black Maria. named after the van used by police to take away prisoners It was covered in black tarpaper and had a large window in the ceiling that opened up to let in sunlight, as early films required a tremendous amount of bright light. The Maria was built on a turntable so the window could rotate to face the sun throughout the day, supplying natural light for hundreds of Edison movie productions over the eight years of its operation. Seers is interested in this building as it was a space both for photographing and for projection. It is in a reconstruction of this dark room that she is projecting the spectacular, complex, reflective and mirrored images that constitute her explorations of her journeys through a world and an experience defined by the shifting operations, the flicker, the constructions and transformations, of photography.

It is a complex project — this text can only outline a few strands, make a rough outline — and it is quixotic. Her reclamations and analogues, her experiments and modelling with medium and technology, have a touching impossibility and a wry hint of inevitable failure built into them. We are left with the desire to reveal and to understand. Meaning and certainty become ultimately contingent, flickering. We are left with the glowing image of a human being repeatedly returning to the mystery of the image, its meaning, and finding ways to articulate and understand the ways it imprints and impacts upon a body and a life.

Review:

Swallowing Black Maria – Smart Project Space – Review 2007.pdf