Viewing Room

Alex Seton
Reality is Fabulous

Melbourne
09 May – 01 Jun 24

INTRODUCTION

A multidisciplinary artist whose work incorporates photography, video, sculpture and installation, Seton is best known for his unique marble sculptures, fusing craftsmanship with unexpected contemporary forms.

In a career spanning three decades, his internationally acclaimed practice looks squarely at the choices we are faced with today, challenging expectations with artworks that question our collective decisions and what we determine has value.

In this body of work, the artist takes a close look at the puffer jacket as a ubiquitous fashion item, wryly suggestive of the very human desire to protect and insulate oneself from the outside world.

The title of his exhibition is borrowed from Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 novel, Walden Pond, in which the author attests to humanity’s struggles in sorting fact from fiction.

Here, Seton leans into the slippage between our real and online worlds, presenting material illusions in Australian marble combined with references to internet memes like the AI-generated Pope’s puffer jacket.

Asking us to consider what have we surrendered in accepting the many modern conveniences of our digital lives, and how do we reliably and authentically navigate society where disinformation and ideas of a ‘post-truth’ have flourished?

Alex Seton, 2024
Photography by Mark Pokorny

Accept All Cookies (Enchantment/Disenchantment Series) 2024

Chillagoe Pearl marble (Wakaman, QLD), cosmetic finishing powder
125 kg
35 × 72 × 47 cm
Photography by Mark Pokorny

Alex Seton, Accepts All Cookies, 2024
Installation view, Sullivan+Strumpf, Naarm/Melbourne
Photography by Mark Pokorny

"Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous."

HENRY DAVID THOREU, WALDEN POND, 1854

Ache for an Epilogue (Enchantment/Disenchantment Series) 2024

Chillagoe Pearl marble (Wakaman, QLD), cosmetic finishing powder
35 × 72 × 47 cm
125 kg

Doppelgänger (60% Authentic) (Enchantment/Disenchantment Series) 2024

Chillagoe Pearl marble (Wakaman, QLD), cosmetic finishing powder
35 × 72 × 47 cm
125 kg

Alex Seton, Ache for an Epilogue (Enchantment/Disenchantment Series), 2024
Chillagoe Pearl marble (Wakaman), cosmetic finishing powder
35 × 72 × 47 cm
125 kg

Alex Seton, Doppelgänger (60% Authentic) (Enchantment/Disenchantment Series), 2024
Chillagoe Pearl marble (Wakaman), cosmetic finishing powder
35 × 72 × 47 cm
125 kg

"[Reality is Fabulous] leads us through an exploration of the tensions between truth and fiction, authenticity and artifice, and the utopian expectations we hold around our relationship with technology and the natural world."

JOANNA KITTO

And So It Goes.. 2023

Chillagoe Pearl marble (Wakaman, QLD), Mica setting powder
35 × 65 × 45 cm
125 kgs
Photography by Mark Pokorny

"A voluminous coat that insulates the body from the elements, the puffer allows its wearer to place a barrier between themselves and the outer world. For Seton, this desire goes beyond keeping warm, but encapsulates the construction of one’s own space in response to the pressures of contemporary life."

JOANNA KITTO

Alex Seton, Reality is Fabulous, 2024
Installation view, Sullivan+Strumpf, Naarm/Melbourne
Photography by Mark Pokorny

When We Know Where We Are, We Know Who We Are 2024

Chillagoe Pearl marble (Wakaman, QLD), Cast iron, enamel, blackbutt
156 × 69 × 93.5 cm
1060 kg

When We Know Where We Are, We Know Who We Are, 2024, detail
Photography by Mark Pokorny

Hallucinations of Earth (Pilbara Green) 2024

archival inkjet print on on dibond, steel frame
110 × 116 cm
Edition of 3 plus 2 AP

Hallucinations of Earth (Australian Travertine) 2024

archival inkjet print on on dibond, steel frame
110 × 116 cm
Edition of 3 plus 2 AP

Hallucinations of Earth (Pilbara Red) 2024

archival inkjet print on on dibond, steel frame
110 × 116 cm
Edition of 3 plus 2 AP

"In these carvings, the very fabric of reality is at once concrete and illusory."

ALEX SETON

The Last Invention 2023

Wombeyan marble (Gundungurra, NSW), costmetic finishing powder
110 × 68 × 77 cm
700 kg

A Person of Substance 2024

Pearl marble (Wakaman) and cosmetic finishing powder
35 × 22 × 21 cm

Alex Seton, Reality is Fabulous, 2024
Installation view, Sullivan+Strumpf, Naarm/Melbourne
Photography by Mark Pokorny

Alex Seton, Reality is Fabulous, 2024
Installation view, Sullivan+Strumpf, Naarm/Melbourne
Photography by Mark Pokorny

EXHIBITION ESSAY: A TRIP INTO THE MIRROR WORLD

We are living in an age of climate crisis, big tech, a collapse of trust in the media, post-truth politics, and we are increasingly deeply online. A decade ago, we may have been digitally literate enough to decipher the authentic from the sham. Today, we can no longer trust our ability to distinguish between the two. From the most insidious cases of falsehood peddled by the likes of a certain ex/future US President to the saturation of the deepfake, we are adrift in a sea of suspicion, constantly concerned that we are being lied to and manipulated. And we are right to be suspicious.

Take for example, the ‘Balenciaga Pope’. In early 2023, a striking photo of Pope Francis swagged out in a white puffer jacket went viral. Of course, it wasn’t real — it was generated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) by a construction worker in Chicago. Though not the first AI image to sweep the internet, it was the first to be widely mistaken for real, and the first mass deception event created by AI.

For artist Alex Seton, the ‘Balenciaga Pope’ became an icon for the slippage between our material and digital realities, towards the dissolution of the boundaries between them. In Reality is Fabulous at Sullivan+Strumpf, Seton’s first commercial exhibition in Melbourne, the puffer jacket becomes our guide. It leads us through an exploration of the tensions between truth and fiction, authenticity and artifice, and the utopian expectations we hold around our relationship with technology and the natural world.

This isn’t the first time Seton has been interested in the symbolic power of clothing. Over his two-decade long practice, he has returned time and time again to items with the ability to conceal and protect their wearer: hoodies, life jackets, shrouds. He now turns his attention to the puffer jacket. Their soft padded folds, when meticulously carved in marble, offer a tactile, material experience to the casual observer; each pucker and fold in the fabric seemingly soft enough to reach out and squeeze. Yet, as with all of Seton’s work, it's the underlying histories, analogies and complications of the attire that give this work its weight.

Created by Australian mountaineer George Finch to climb Mount Everest in 1922, the puffer has evolved into a ubiquitous item of both fast and high fashion over the last one hundred years. A voluminous coat that insulates the body from the elements, the puffer allows its wearer to place a barrier between themselves and the outer world. For Seton, this desire goes beyond keeping warm, but encapsulates the construction of one’s own space in response to the pressures of contemporary life.

The exhibition’s title, Reality is Fabulous, is borrowed from a line in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 novel Walden Pond. The phrase reads in full: “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.” Bemoaning humanity’s struggles with sorting fact from fiction, Thoreau uses the term ‘fabulous’ in the 19th-century sense, deriving from the same source as the word ‘confabulation’: the telling of tall tales, inventions and hallucinations. Today, Thoreau’s warning is somewhat lost in contemporary use of the word, and yet his core concern remains as relevant as ever.

Part personal declaration of independence, part manual for self-reliance, Walden Pond is a reflection on simple living in natural surroundings. Growing up off-grid in rural New South Wales, in many ways the book shaped Seton’s childhood, and continues to resonate. For Thoreau, and for Seton to some extent, there is a romanticism to mindfully sequestering yourself away from society, being protective of your time and energy so that when you do participate, you do so with intention. This is ‘real’ living—or at least one that offers a little more autonomy or authenticity to Seton.

Today, the idea of living off the grid seems a privilege, with our ability to ‘opt out’ less and less possible. Ironically, it’s far easier to disappear into the online world than retreat into the natural one. In Seton’s inner-western Sydney studio, we chat about the amount of time we’ve been spending online. Particularly over the last few years, through lockdowns, social media and Zoom, it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate our digital selves from our authentic selves. The way we present ourselves online has become the way that people know us, and the way we know ourselves. Here, online, we design our selfhood, our sanctuary. We actively dissolve the boundaries between the digital and the material and go all in on the imagined space in between.

Seton is singular in the Australian contemporary art landscape for his long-held fascination with marble. Marble calls us to consider time, matter and the ethics of production. It represents a desire to reconnect with the earth. We see Australian marbles (Wombeyan- Gundungurra, NSW, Chillagoe Pearl – Wakaman, QLD) alongside high resolution photographic prints of Pilbara Red, Melocco Jade (Nyamal, WA) and Australian travertine samples. “Carving with marble makes me think about the consequences of our relationship with nature, with natural materials, and with deep geological time,” Seton says, “When you’re looking at marble, you can't help but feel we are a small part vitally connected to something much bigger.” The puffer jacket on the other hand, is far from ecologically friendly. Mass produced with stuffing made of both real and synthetic down, the garment is symbolic of the cognitive dissonance with nature that has led to our longing to return to the wild for reprieve from modern living, and, more tragically, the ecological disaster of our times.

In drawing on marble and marble reproductions, Seton also invites contradiction into this discussion around augmented and digital realities. For the Enchantment/Disenchantment series, the marble has been enhanced with cosmetic mica powders, exaggerating the tension between the synthetic nature of the garment and the natural material of marble, and a nod to the polychrome marble sculptures of antiquity. He says, “in these carvings, the very fabric of reality is at once concrete and illusory.”

Marble lends itself to an interplay between (art) history and contemporary concerns. In The Last Invention, Seton recalls La Pensée (1895) by Auguste Rodin, a sculpture of a woman's head in a 19th century bonnet, emerging directly from the raw block and appearing lost in thought. Here, Seton has tossed a hooded puffer over the top of a block of marble and carved out a “disembodied space for disembodied thoughts.” The title references statistician I.J. Good’s 1965 writings on the intelligence explosion wrought by AI, prophesying that, “the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that humans need ever make.”

As Good illustrates, a yearning for technology to provide the salve to modern living is hardly new. The 1960s and early ‘70s ushered in a time of great technological development, and with it an age of optimism for what technology can offer society. Throughout Reality is Fabulous, colour hints at this history’s resonance, and the knife’s edge between optimism and dystopianism around the adoption of new technologies in our lives. Blue walls line the gallery, their colour reflected in the mirror pools. The tone has the intended impact of a utopian blue sky, or pool of crisp water, but the pigment is in fact derived from the blue bubble of Apple’s iMessage. Elsewhere, a block of marble sits on a stand painted International Orange, a modern invention used in the aerospace industry to set objects apart from their surroundings that became ubiquitous with the technological advancement of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Think the colour of NASA’s aerospace suits, or San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Two decades later, in 1996, fellow San Franciscan and Apple mastermind Steve Jobs understood that tech wasn’t going to be the great world change we sought but rather, it would ‘augment the world’, returning the sense of control to our hand.

This brings us back to the contemporary space of AR, AI, and the deepfake. The term ‘mirror world’ is an attempt to map real world objects, environments and scenarios in digital form. As utopian in theory as the conversations were being had fifty years ago, mirror worlds, or digital twins, are a space within which to play, test and simulate the ‘real’ in order to understand it. The insidious side of this technology is rearing its head in ways less comical than the 'Balenciaga Pope'. Authorities across the world are growing increasingly concerned at the sophistication of deepfake technology and the nefarious uses it can be put to. In February of this year, a finance worker at a multinational firm in Hong Kong was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters who used deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call with several members of staff, all of whom were fake.

Seton’s Doppelgänger (60% Authentic) invites us to grapple with these tensions. The 'Balengiaga Pope' taught the artist that the puffer is incredibly easy for AI to render, and he seized the opportunity to tease out the central conceit of this body of work. Reality is Fabulous sees two sculpted puffer jackets side-by-side, one the perfect inverse of the other. The first is hand-carved over many hours and weeks in his studio. The other has been partially rendered in marble using AI technology, the artist’s hand finishing the work. To the naked eye, Doppelgänger is an uncanny reflection of its twin, unsettling our presumptions of authenticity. There is something both impressive and disquieting about the experience of the pair. Our brain works overtime to detect whether we are being manipulated. As we wander further into the mirror world, unclear where our world ends and the other begins, it’s a muscle we best get used to flexing.

JOANNA KITTO

Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the Indigenous People of this land, the traditional custodians on whose Country we work, live and learn. We pay respect to Elders, past and present, and recognise their continued connection to culture, land, waters and community.

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