Sophie Seita

My contact aureoles

Sophie Seita, My Contact Aureoles, installation, 2022

Birch ply panels (104x69cm), gesso, graphite, and drafting film sheets, projection, sound (6’33”). Sound recorded and mixed by Rupert Clerveaux. Photographs by Laura Cobb.

[full title] after the cooling, the igneous, which sets, has the potential to ignite, my contact aureoles

My Contact Aureoles began as a series of performance photographs taken by the artist’s partner in a dried-up canyon in the Big Bend National Park in Texas near the Mexican border in March 2020. These images became an invitation for a text written in response, starting a dialogue through interwoven materiality. Thrown onto the variable solidity of wooden panels and curtains of drafting sheets, the photographs remain—just like the memory and intimacy of what’s depicted—only projection, only light. The text, both recorded and inscribed in graphite onto the panels, reads the images and they in turn document a process of reading the rock. The work deals with the knottiness of articulation and loving address, the play between abstraction and autobiography, and the difficulty of capturing feelings, their reverberations and entanglements. Wavering between ephemerality and commitment, words become surety and (in)tangible promise. Other themes that surface and stick are curiosity and mysticism, the process of bringing the complex into the simple or vice versa. While the photographic series remains ephemeral and refuses to become an object, language itself does become the material around which everything spins centrifugally. Each element of the piece represents an act of material translation, as radiant contact.

A conversation between the two artists and the curator Zsuzsa Benke is available here.

The opening lecture performance developed into a separate piece, more here.

Exhibition:
There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body, two-person show, Hoxton253, London, 2022.

Installation shots:
Mirko Boffelli Photography (2022)

Funding:
’Hello again, Hackney’ Grant, Hackney Council;
Eaton Fund