Unit London is thrilled to announce the opening of Alex Seton’s Platform exhibition, which features as the next solo show in our online viewing room (click here to view).
The Platform exhibition series creates a focussed space in which artists can respond to a range of social and political issues. In keeping with the fundamental beliefs of the programme, 10% of all sales proceeds from each Platform show will be donated to a charity of the artist’s choosing. For his solo exhibition, Seton has nominated The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, an Australian-based charity that provides food, aid, healthcare and other support to those in need.
Seton works in sculpture, photography, video and installation, but he is best known for his work with marble carving. Throughout his career, the artist has maintained a dialogue with the techniques and aesthetics of classical sculpture and monument. However, Seton continually subverts these ideas, reimagining them to produce sculptures that engage with the concerns of contemporary society. Seton’s recent work directly grapples with current socio-political issues, attempting to respond to broader narratives through a more humanist perspective.
Alex Seton, The Listenting Post (detail), 2021, Molong marble, stainless steel, 185 x 28 x 22 cm
Alex Seton’s Platform exhibition presents four tangible sculptures and four that exist in Augmented Reality. These pieces make up the artist’s ‘Personal Monument’ series, which continues Seton’s explorations of classical sculpture and public monuments. However, through this body of work, Seton also seeks to convey something more intimate. The artist’s works may initially be inspired by large-scale sculptural pieces, but Seton has condensed these ideas to a more personal scale. As such, his Platform works take on a more specific narrative.
Alex Seton, Toppling the Monument, 2021
For his Platform exhibition, Seton has worked mainly with Australian Wombeyan and Molong varieties of marble. He works with large blocks of the material, chiselling and carving out fractions of limbs and other body parts that appear from the textured and raw surface of the marble. The resulting pieces create figures that are at once trapped in the stone and are stone themselves. These figures, fragmentary in nature, then resist the grandiosity of classical and historical large-scale sculpture works. They partly pay homage to figures who would not typically be immortalised in public squares, those who have been historically disregarded and excluded. In this vein, these figures, hovering between flesh and stone, play with traditional sculptural ideas while engaging with more contemporary notions of representation. Equally, as a result of the AR component of his pieces, Seton understands that these works can find their way into public spaces, though by atypical means. The Augmented Reality feature of the artist’s sculptures seems to place the works in the hands of the public, allowing them to position the pieces wherever they choose and seemingly crossing the chasm between public and private spaces.