Seton Smith
"Blue Stairs"

To be in a room with work by Seton Smith is an altogether different experience than when one confronts conventional photographic images attached to the wall. Her juggling of architectural space, urban landscape, and nature, both photographed and actual, belongs more to the genre of post-modern sculpture than traditional photographic presentations. Because Smith uses the materials of photography, not as a complete and solitary entity, she is rigorous and determined with the photograph's placement. Often her work is planned to be shown in specific settings that are transformed by the intervention of these photographic elements: in Reims, a garden in Champagne was brought into a cement parking garage; in Paris, Smith's photographed forest graced fin de siècle windows at the Opera Comique as well as in the Theater Casino of Enghein les Bains. Here inside the Maison Européenne de la Photographie the viewer is positioned between lightboxes and the shaded effect of the photographed green leafy trees against the rue François Miron.

Stairways, egresses, and pathways play a considerable role in Smith's vocabulary. Elements of architecture that are stages of transition suspend the balance of the presences passing through them. Fragmented images apear frozen in the electric blue light boxes which awake the viewer in order to reactivate their memory and resurface their personal experience in relation to architecural space. Nature brings into question its usual function as the metaphor of the peacefull, the idyllic, the protected.

Smith's strategy of tweaking existing dynamic surroundings with potent photographic overlays is not intended to concretize a particular idea or document some imagined truth. Her aura filled situation may provoke one to remember the reverberation of something real or conjectural.

Deborah Irmans.