The corridor project
margaret seymour and virginia hilyard
The new Tin Sheds gallery in Sydney is not tin any more and not very shed-like either. The polished concrete floors and open space suggest a certain foyer-like ambience or a place where you might go to find stackable chairs and a foldaway table. The Corridor Project by Margaret Seymour and Virginia Hilyard shown there recently reinforced this sense of indeterminacy with the two works appearing almost as if they had been left rather than installed.
On the outside (or was it the inside turned out?), Toilette Indiscrete by Virginia Hilyard resembled a huge packing case that had been partially dismantled and then abandoned for a tea break. Margaret Seymour's The Mirrored Room was not a real room at all but rather a large screen angled away from the interior of the gallery, as if encouraging the formation of a dead end. Together they invited digression, creating a space where footsteps must slow and the viewer is tempted to loiter without and within. Viewing, in this instance, becomes a matter of standing and moving away and coming back, trying to find a place from which to see what is there. The works are all motion pictures, movies in which the viewer must play a role.
The tall plywood walls of Toilette Indiscrete permit one small opening through which the viewer is able to perve, as if through a hole in the fence, at what is happening inside. There, grainy footage of a woman endlessly brushing her hair is projected through the twirling blades of a fan onto the far side of the space. Like a domestic cyclorama with the viewer shut outside, it offers an evocative glimpse of a private