Lindsay Seers

The Double | The Lowry Centre, Salford

1 April - 30 September 2000

The Lowry Centre, Salford

(with Thomas Ruff, James Reilly and Alice Maher)

Materials: Ventriloquist's Dummy with stool and electronics, vacuum formed wall mounted sculptures, curtain, R-Type photographs and cibachromes mounted on aluminium.

Exhibition catalogue: The Double  (Art at the Lowry), Gilda Williams (2000)
Excerpt from introduction by Emma Anderson

"Lindsay Seers’ work takes ambivalence to extremes. Preoccupied by using herself as the subject of her work: she photographs herself in a series of eerie, seductive poses. In Bloodless her reversed image scrutinises a mirror where her positive reflection appears. The diptych Dispossessed/Possessed shows her reversed again, printed in negative: two sleepwalkers transfixed in space. These works hint at the psychic tradition of the subversive double. Photographs such as Supernaturalist and Bloodless show her transformed with glowing colours, joke-shop fangs or pixie ears. Elsewhere in Eat My Words and Sea Change she appears with the doll Candy.

There is an unsettling relationship between the artist and Candy. As with all ventriloquists’ dummies we want to know who is in control, who is doing the talking? But in fact Candy doesn’t talk – her mouth is a camera. She sits perched on a stool, motionless until a sensor detects movement and then she jerks into life and snaps her mouth open and shut. For the Lowry, Lindsay Seers has created an installation where Candy is seated at the end of the corridor covered with a macabre wallpaper of animals devouring their own kind. This new work explores links between desiring and devouring: impulses to control or possess by swallowing up, so that one eats the things one loves the best."