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William Seeto

Prime meridian

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On arriving at The Performance Space for the opening of Bill Seeto's Prime Meridian, and expecting to find the well known interior, we come instead to a place transformed by Seeto into a space we can no longer take for granted, one to which we now pay direct and minute attention. By constructing new physical and visual structures within, he has forced us in to a sort of corporeal viewing: impossible to experience distantly, we seem to "see with the flesh as well as the eyes", as Billy Crawford suggests in a foreword to the catalogue. Moving trough actual space in real time—it being "the one literal dimension of thought"1 —we enter a dream space which exists in both real and oneiric time.

Suddenly in this space we no longer know: the floor slants upwards, looking as though it will keep rising, looking like something from Coney Island, all kooky and spooky—while at the same time restrained and elegant. This strangeness gives way to an almost immediate acceptance: the re-framed windows seeming perfect as they are, the floor's angle being only as it should be. The space becoming personalised is also becoming to us, is becoming our space. As we move inwards in real time through real space, we move inwards to our own time and to our own space. We "intersect the great circle of the Earth at the observer's zenith" (OED). At our zenith—we fix a prime meridian.

Coming up the ramp we grow larger 'till the prospect of walking through the re-framed doorway, (de-framed as it were, reduced to a tiny black hole) seems daunting. This tiny entrance which has made