Alex Seton: Pygmalion

In Roman mythology, Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved. The ‘Pygmalion effect’ is the phenomenon in which higher expectations lead to an increase in performance. Its inverse is the ‘Golem effect’, by which low expectations lead to a decrease in performance. Both effects are forms of a self-fullling prophecy; both observable effects at play in a world divided by the privilege of circumstance.

Using these themes, Seton replaces components of antique and modern bentwood chairs with his familiar medium of marble and digitally printed plastic proxies. The result is a series of hybrids in which the mass-produced melds with the hand made.

Furniture has been an ongoing reference point for the artist, from his very first exhibition in which gallery seating benches were reproduced in marble. Likewise, the transformation of functional objects into art objects has been a continuing preoccupation.

This receives a twist in the work Bentwood Hybrids. Here, two antique Thonet bentwood chairs which were previously unable to be used, have been altered with prostheses. The replacement legs and seat simultaneously repair and corrupt the chairs’ original forms and function, employing the resonance of monumental marble as part of a poetic narrative of expectation and transformation.

The other works in the show utilise contemporary Thonet replicas in combination with a number of carved marble motifs and other elements. In the two works Pygmalion Effect and Golem Effect, a skull rests on the seat of each chair – the former carved from viscerally bone-coloured Statuario marble, the latter a three-dimensional print of the same form in sinister black. Above the black skull a pendulum is suspended, pointed directly at the cranium below. The works suggest the power and finality of perception, and the difficulty in shaking a negative opinion once it has been formed.