Frieze Magazine | Shows

Previous Shows

Helen Sear

Helen Sear, Inside The View (2005)

Frederick Sommer’s 1946 portrait of Max Ernst is perhaps his best known photomontage; the double exposure shows the wild-eyed surrealist melding into an efflorescence-stained concrete wall. What was once a labour intensive photographic process can today be achieved with a few clicks of a mouse, as demonstrated in Helen Sear’s eponymous solo show by the series ‘Inside The View’ (2005-). Borrowing its title from a series of collages by Ernst, this set of nine wistful photomontages comprises bucolic scenes overlaid with translucent headshots of anonymous figures shot from behind. A painterly sensibility with an affection for sublimity is demonstrated as Sear fuses together the formal tropes of landscape and portraiture found within the Northern Romantic tradition. In an additional move – belying the work’s apparent simplicity – Sear disrupts the surface of each image with a painstaking process of digital erasure, whereby shimmering veils that resemble delicate lacework are hand-drawn in the computer. For Sear, the corrosion of these images by hand signifies a return to a more ‘primitive and bodily experience’, although quite how this is achieved in the digital domain is unclear.

Projection (2008)

Showing in the gallery’s musty cellar is the film Projection (2008). Sear appears to have aimed her camera directly at the sun for this series of richly coloured scenes evoking the dog days of summer. After a few minutes of viewing, however, it becomes clear that, unlike Gustav Fechner, the experimental German psychologist whose eyesight was severely damaged from staring at the sun, the gaze of Sear’s camera is fixed firmly on the bulb of a slide-projector as it radiates through coloured filters. Despite its simplicity, Projection is remarkably affecting, and, even after the artifice is revealed, the surrogate sun continues to induce feelings of repose that would surely have enlivened Fechner’s investigations into the corporeality of vision.

Display (2007-9)

Upstairs, Display (2007-9) presents a dazzling wallpapered room placing the viewer in the midst of what appears to be a bustling aviary. A menagerie of digitally collaged birds envelops you; although the imagery remains static, the dioramic installation seems to teem with activity. The source of Sear’s vertiginous montage is, however, far from lively, being based on photographs of taxidermy displays. The relating of photography to taxidermy highlights rich conceptual parallels: both are indexical as well as mimetic, and, in both, time is suspended and decomposition deferred – in the words of Roland Barthes, they both refer to ‘that which has been’. Rather than continuing to explore this fertile ground, however, Sear disrupts the scene with a multi-coloured harlequinesque pattern covering the work’s entire surface like an obfuscating camouflage; each individual diamond has been digitally hand-coloured, though to what end – besides engendering visual overload – remains frustratingly unfathomable.

In the adjacent gallery, an unassuming animation, Flown (2001), features an empty bird cage slowly spinning like a child’s dangling mobile. The evocative simplicity of this motif is both soothing and unsettling: the cage’s former occupant may well have flown to freedom, though the accompanying silence suggests the aftermath of a more sinister episode – the piece transmutes into a sombre memento mori.

Sear’s inquiries into the construction and perception of images are at their most satisfying when she’s employing an elegant economy of means. An unrestrained tendency to clutter the work – piling on the layers and references – at times results in a loss of clarity; like the dematerializing Ernst in Sommer’s nebulous portrait, so Sear’s concerns can start to lose definition. Despite these shortcomings, there is a formal vigour running throughout the beautifully installed exhibition that acts as a seductive foil, ensuring the work’s visceral impact is not lost.

David Trigg