Modern Relics

 

Integral to the theme of the modern relics series is an accompanying reliquary. Where instead of displaying the relics of saints these delicately crafted receptacles contain objects associated to the traits of modern life. Broken time pieces, fragments of words and locks of hair are a few of the items stored within the reliquaries. Cleverly woven into the narrative of the associated painting, the transparent cubed part of the reliquary containing the relic is represented in the related painting as an anamorphic projection - the skull in Holbiens' Ambassadors (see below). Like distortions of time or things from another dimension these strange objects hover like ideas or thought bubbles around the figures. In each painting looms a shadowy silhouette of the affiliated reliquary, forever linking image and object - the real to the unreal.

Seth Garland, 2007

 

Created for a solo exhibition at the Albemarle Gallery, London