Iris Seyler

5 November 1998 - 18 December 1998
Opening Reception 5 November 1998 8pm

Project Room:

Senselucence

Senselucence ploys glass in a way that inverts its conventional symbolic meaning. The layers are reminiscent of the stratigraphic column of geology. The photocopies of the eye, mouth, nose, ear and finger embedded in these layers mimic fossils – or rather fossilized tracks deposited at different points in time. The entire construction symbolizes the structure of buried memory, which is not gone but obscured underneath the mass of subsequently accumulated memories. memories too, may be accessed but are likely to remain blurry as they resist full recovery.

In the German language obvious conclusions are often labeled with the adjective “glasklar” – clear as glass. Yet, the mode in which I employ glass turns the obvious nature of the material world on its head. While as a single pane “clear” glass allows the viewer to get a nearly perfect view of objects beyond, the layering of such panes will achieve a dimming effect of increasing opaqueness – a result of the material’s impurities. Repetitive images fade with increasing depth, therby simulating qualitatively different placements within a temporal frame of reference. I offer a consciously ambiguous play with perception as an attempt to illustrate mental and sense-related processes — namely loss of definition and diminution of memory with increasing temporal distance from any underlying event – in a static three dimensional medium.

Iris Seyler was born in Worms, West-Germany. She completed an apprenticeship as a stonemason and stone sculptor at Meisterschule fur Handwerker in Kaiserslautern, Germany,. After undergraduate studies at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver, and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design -BFA 1991 – she received her Masters of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Connecticut in 1997. Iris has exhibited her work in the Maritimes, Western Canada, New England and New York City. This is her first Toronto show.

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