Lindsay Seers

Calidoscopio | Museo del Barro, Asunción, Paraguay

21 August - 21 October 2003

Museo del Barro, Asunción, Paraguay

Materials: photographs 25cm²  mounted on aluminium, ventriloquist dummy; 2 x 12 minute VHS video work on a monitor; one night screening outside of 12 minute VHS work.

Whilst in Paraguay Seers documented the room in which she was staying, recording details which she believed would almost certainly be erased by time from her memory – quotidian things such as how a table leg meets the floor or the profile of a skirting board and so on. Somehow it seems possible that we have this detailed contingent information of things (in this case of the rooms we live in) inside of us somewhere at a latent level – but these details can not necessarily be brought forward from memory to consciousness.

In response to wanting to capture a memory as an embodied image, Seers recorded images of the room (and the immediate vicinity of the house) in her mouth in a ritualised daily practise: preparing light sensitive paper in the dark of the wardrobe and then later inserting the paper in her mouth whilst wearing a black sack.

The images are captured in her body in a process that means she is physically conjoined to the moment of capture in an intense way. The distant click of the sealed black box of a mechanical/digital camera cannot fully connect her to the act of photographing in the way this ritualised practise can. The photographs go red with the light passing through the blood of her cheeks. There is an accompanying image – an external image, which acts a document of where the body was located. These are usually in black and white.

Lying down, often on the floor, she tries to retain images through her body memory as well as in her mind as they imprint on to the paper. The work is both melancholic and ecstatic as to the presence of material in time and the peculiarity of ordinary things. It draws attention to one's own physical presence as matter (another object in the world) and the impact  consciousness (memory) has on being present.