2010 ALEXANDER SETON: INFINITELY NEAR

EXHIBITION IMAGES

There is no static being, no unchanging substratum. Change, movement, is Lord of the Universe. Everything is in a state of becoming, of continual flux.
Heraclitus Phanta Rhei

The works in “Infinitely Near” are full of Romance. It is Alexander Seton’s imagined far east, outfitted with glistening plastic palm trees masquerading at the oasis, made from marble. They are impossible buildings that never were, built in drawings and watercolours that are hushed by the largeness of the objects.

Playfully gleeful, there is a sense that the viewer is being laughed at, gently. There is a delightful absurdity of “The Best is the enemy of the good,” in the inflated black Taj Mahal - such a serious and stern unbuilt mythology reduced to a mere novelty item. The hunt for Moby Dick is encapsulated in ‘That Accursed White Whale’ with the flat, deflated white whale pool toy, but with valves suggesting a possible inflation or discovery. There is a Romantic melancholy about it too though, from the impossibility of inflation of the physical object in marble, a Byronic idealism that the objects cannot, and in fact, do not want to exist.

The deflated jumping castle of "This, that which does not yet have a Name" can never be physically realised, but within the bounds of the imagination, in the realm of the artist, or the child, or the visionary, the potential which the work provides can be taken and inflated to life. But through the solidity of the object - the sheer object-ness and materiality of the sculptures teases the viewer with the contradiction of the soft to the solid and back again. Are we saddened that the marble, in its nature, cannot be inflated, or are we thrilled with the optimism of dreaming the impossible, and imagining the romantic suggestion into being?
The work evokes the processes of being and becoming. The objects exist as they are, but also exist in a place where they could be; unrealised future points of existing, as inflated or deflated. Just as the objects are created from a place that may or may not exist, they only wholly exist in that point of becoming rather than of being. Thus, the narrative, be it imagined or impossible or as empty as an inflated toy, is developed by and carried in the objects. In the watercolours on slabs of marble, of "Everybody wants to rule the World", is this suggestion - images of half remembered, half imagined buildings creating a reality out of what has been forgotten.

I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ...
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

As in Borges’ universe of the mythical library of Babel, where all books that could be written exist, all things can be or become, and yet, because of that, the infinite nearness of that much potential can give birth to a sort of impotence. Seton’s works exists in that difficult, curious, delightful space in a Romantic positioning between being and nothingness, questioning and enticing the viewer to engage with the work, the narrative, and the imagination.

elizabeth caplice
Librarian
National Library of Australia