Keeping Up with the Smiths
PBICA displays the innovative work of two generations
Sometimes Seton will capture roughly the same view from slightly different angles, as in three of the six photos that take up one wall in the main gallery and that vary the view of rooftops and buildings ever so subtly. The diptych On the March (2001), in the same grouping, does the same thing with a light-flooded interior staircase.
Initially I questioned whether Seton's insistence on out-of-focus imagery might be overly mannered. But her pictures are so quietly haunting that I kept going back to them. They're like stills from someone else's dreams.
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After drifting into a reverie over Seton's photographs, you can experience another kind of dreamy photography in PBICA's New Media Lounge upstairs, where "Oliver Herring: Spit Reverse" is playing.
This video installation consists of three projectors, each casting a slow-motion video onto the opposite wall. The people in the videos, which are sometimes as blurry as Seton Smith's pictures, are all engaged in the same activity: spurting streams of water from their mouths, sometimes individually, sometimes in groups, sometimes in pairs (including two brothers who look to be twins).
The catch is that Herring runs the videos in reverse, so that the sprays of liquid collect into streams that flow back into the spitters' mouths. Yes, I know it sounds disgusting, but there's also a strange beauty to this watery work.
