Margaret Seymour - THE MIRRORED ROOM Live images captured by installed surveillance cameras Friday 3rd September 2004 Visit www.margaretseymour.net for further information
Virginia Hilyard - TOILETTE INDISCRETE Super8 colour film, silent, projected from DVD

"Surveillance, Voyeurism & Body Panic..."

THE CORRIDOR PROJECT is the first stage in a new collaborative project by MARGARET SEYMOUR and VIRGINIA HILYARD. Both artists utilise the possibilities inherent in new media, but resonating through their two new works are echoes of older moving image technologies like film. Each artist draws the viewer into an intense relationship with the moving image and attempts to capture the moment when desire is frustrated - when the image eludes the grasp of the viewing subject and seems to slip away. In this way the artists use the seductive power of film to critique the desire of the viewing subject who always remains distanced from the object of their gaze.

In THE MIRRORED ROOM, MARGARET SEYMOUR uses images from two surveillance cameras to create a mirror image of the gallery space. Visitors are invited to don a pair of 3D glasses (the type used to view 3D movies) and to experience an image of themselves that floats in a fluid realm - at times existing in front of the screen, at other times sunk back behind the screen. By reproducing or mirroring the gallery space, and at the same time making it strange, THE MIRRORED ROOM recreates the uncanny effect of photographic and televisual images that seem to both disrupt and expand our ordinary experience of space and time.

In VIRGINIA HILYARD'S work TOILETTE INDISCRÈTE , the viewer is held back from entering the space of the image, forced to view through a narrow tunnel that opens onto a circular enclosed space. A syncopated rhythm disrupts the projected image, echoing the effect of the shutter gate more often associated with older film technology. HILYARD attempts to draw the viewer into a relationship with the image where desire is frustrated. In the era of Big Brother, where people are allowed to watch 24 hours a day, TOILETTE INDISCRÈTE rebels against the idea of panoptic vision.