Lindsay Seers: It Has To Be This Way 1.5

About

In 1999 a young woman was involved in a moped accident. She suffered damage to both her short and long-term memory and was left unable to decipher her experiences. A year later she went missing in Rome and has subsequently not been found. It has to be this way1.5 is a new commission by aspex and marks Lindsay Seers' continued attempts to unravel the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the young woman, her stepsister, Christine Parkes. The artist, obsessed with the transformative powers of photography, follows streams of associations; her stepsister's boyfriend's diary, her mother's memories alongside a shared archive of images and papers, determine the outline of her ongoing journey and the form for the unfolding narrative of the work. The viewer enters a structure in which everything is connected, a memory theatre painted blue, a giant star, a doubled video, and a documentary and novella that weave together a complex set of relationships which shift at every turn. What constitutes the artistic practice of Lindsay Seers is not mere storytelling, but a matrix where there is no formal separation between the conceptual investigation of the act of photography, the camera as apparatus, the common desire for film and photography to act as evidence of events, and the complex historical and personal synchronicities of the events themselves. What we are witnessing in the work of Seers is not so much a detached systematic outline of these relationships, but the unfolding of the creative process, where the act of observation and understanding influences the outcome of events. Through Seers' photographic explorations the past is constantly reconfigured, as if it contains an infinite virtual potential for different outcomes, which are all already embedded in one another.