QUAD presented the first UK showing of Monocular, by internationally renowned artist Lindsay Seers.
Monocular is an intimate installation, first exhibited in Lofoten in northern Norway that features a tin hut re-situated in the gallery space. Within the structure is embedded a film work by Seers.
The narrator of the project is a Norwegian/English man who Seers met by chance when travelling in Norway researching prefabricated structures. The unnamed man has a rare condition called genetic mosaicism, caused by the fusion of two fertilised eggs at a very early stage of gestation in the womb. A sign of this condition is heterochromia – the possessing of eyes of two different colours – one of which is derived from the absorbed ‘twin’. What we hear in the surround sound track is the medium of film/sound talking to us as if it has become a man – it speaks of its haunted longing to represent.
Like our protagonist’s unseen brother residing in his DNA, the implication is that his haunting is written into the medium at the level of its material structure. This embodied, encoded character emanates from the digital form like a genie from a bottle. Computer generated images of particles and genes emerge as we break through the skin of appearances to the structure of matter.