Lindsay Seers

In Taiwan, Lindsay Seers' work is on show as part of Making Worlds: An Imagineering Project at MoCA Taipei. Curated by Wang Han-Fang, the group exhibition also features works by Joyce Ho, Kosta Tonev, Ericka Beckman, Chang Yun-Han and Chang Wen-Hsuan.

In Entangled4 (Theatre IV) Lindsay Seers returns to androgynous themes present in her 2009 work It has to be this way at Matt's Gallery. The Renaissance 'theatre of the world' motif of this previous work is bastardised by Seers into vaudeville. For Seers this theatrical genre (vaudeville) presents a series of segments in which the artifice of the staging is absurdly evident and failure is omnipresent. Entangled2 presents the Victorian music hall legends Hetty King and Vesta Tilly (both male impersonators), performed by contemporary actors. Both Tilly and King performed in Mile End at the Paragon Theatre, now the Genesis Cinema.

Biography plays a key role in Seers’ work, but is rarely used in an ordinary or straight sense. Stories and lives are used as a more complex narrative vehicle in which coincidence, chance and chaos seem far more at play than any singular notion of freewill or determinism. Entangled2 mirrors Seers’ on-going investigation towards the synthesising of classic dichotomies between self/other, male/female, truth/lies.

Seers treats the past as a myth made of parts that seem to make a coherent whole, of which every element is true, but a fiction is created in the collaging of these fragments as a misconstrued totality.

Context is everything in these works. The gallery is transformed into a hybrid theatre set, a booth, a cinema of sorts, a show case, a shop window, a viewing room. It is work about mutiplicities to be seen by two people through two windows in two rooms on two screens but this twinning is not simplistic as each entitiy carries a myriad of other associations and identities – nothing is singular. The ephemeral screens are inflated balls. They take on different guises such as eyeballs, beach balls and platonic forms. Enfolded in curtains, their shifting connotations pass across their plastic surfaces, creating a meeting point where expression and form commingle.

As usual we enter in the midst of things. The evolution of Seers’ subjects and structures are buffeted on a restless sea, of which she has limited control as the story writes itself and is as fractured and as incoherent as any real event. The forms of her structures arise in the making – each part modifies the other. The very creation of the work evolves from a collection of on-going associations that divide and grow like fractals in an ever-burgeoning pattern.