Midnight Oil

Victor Lim Seaward: Midnight Oil 23 June - 29 July Brooke Benington presents Midnight Oil, a solo installation by Victor Lim Seaward which places us in a posited future or parallel reality. There is a sense of slippage from the familiar to the sublime as we find ourselves entering a space reminiscent of museum archive, or a Wellsian alchemists workshop. We encounter many of the themes Seaward has grappled with in his recent practice; cross-cultural artefacts and colonial histories, nascent technologies and ancestral knowledge, scarcity, mass-production, aesthetic, artistic, intellectual and commercial values. These ideas are encapsulated within a new series of “objet d’art” encountered in the first room of the gallery; these small, jewel-like, 3D generated historical mutations have been printed before being electroplated with precious metals and then hand burnished. Mysterious relics of misremembered civilisations. [Unlikely Wonders]
A bean sprouts in a hand, a tiny promise of life.
Emerging from my shell, I see the world with fresh eyes.
A snail crept close to my ear and whispered its secrets
Her hands clasped in prayer, a woman seeks solace in the unknown 
 A greyhound - the only dog mentioned by name in the bible - gently meanders around a forest just after dusk, a time the French would call the hour between dog and wolf. Static, alert, searching, it is waiting for prey that will never come. There will be no coursing in this landscape. Mangrove roots rise from the ground, their mottled forms a product of this ancient wood growing around muscles which have nestled in their surface, over the course of centuries. A symbiotic relationship, the molluscs provide armour against burrowing parasites. The roots rise up from the swamp like spires, piercing the dense and suffocating mud, allowing the tree to breathe. Found by an act of serendipity in the distant East and shipped in a container across seas and continents, they have lain in stasis in a warehouse in Kent for over 30 years, their original importer now deceased. A hand clutches a sprig of silver birch twigs, fallen from a lone tree in Peckham. Buds about to blossom, they have dropped before they could unfurl during a particularly windy evening. Eyes glow, a portrait of a young Roman man originally carved nearly 2,000 years ago, commissioned by a private patron. Now completely removed from time and space, this marble has been 3D scanned and 3D printed, now simply another asset to be downloaded from a myriad of possibilities, bastardised, its aura debauched and denatured. Working late into the night in his workshop, the artisan slowly chiselled away at the lump of stone, slowly revealing the form, his mind wandering elsewhere as his actions became automatic and his body took control. Pausing for a moment, he looked up to the stars and wondered whether the Roman Empire would exist for another millennium, and if it did, what magical wonders that world would posses. Surely it would, he thought to himself, comforted by this thought. Poems are written by an artificial intelligence, its architecture based upon a neural network, intentionally mimicking the time honoured systems of the brain. Ultimately a vain attempt to better understand the mysterious alchemy of our own consciousness. They didn’t know it yet, but this was the dawn of the technological singularity. Radiolaria, single celled organisms that form elaborate silicate skeletal structures, have gently drifted in the world’s oceans for half a billion years. They are one of the most ancient forms of life - neither animals, nor plants, nor fungi. Vitrines hang, glowing, their 5000k daylight LEDs emitting a sterile and uncompromising temperature of light. Alien to our ancestors, it is now mundanely ubiquitous. Under the light of the neon moon a goldfinch is perched on a branch and quietly observes this dance, midnight oil slowly burning. — Victor Lim Seaward (b. 1988, Kuala Lumpur) is an artist living and working in London. Seaward holds a BA in Art History and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2018 with an MA in Painting. His work is rooted in materiality, technological manufacture, and the agency of objects. Solo exhibitions of his work include: Holy Bark, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2022); Still Life, Galerie Fabian Lang, Zurich (2022); Nebelmeer, Recent Activity, Birmingham (2019); Isabelline and Other Colours, Lily Brooke, London (2019). Group exhibitions of his work include: Rara Avis - Curated by Jerry Stafford, White Cube, Paris (2023); Search Party - Curated by Ben Edmunds, Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (2023); Elbow Room, The Sunday Painter, London (2022); Sculpture In The City 11th Edition, London (2022); Josh Lilley, London (2021); Union Gallery, London (2021); Gossamer Fog, London (2018); Pierre Poumet, Bordeaux (2018).