Disenchanted World, 2008
This series was shown at Bus Projects in Melbourne in 2008. These works were made in response to Max Weber’s writings on disenchantment. The works were built into deep frames with LEDs built into the backing boards of each image. As a result, the works can be viewed in the light with the lights off or in the dark with the lights on. The works all include black adhesive on matt black card, that picks up the light and reflects additional imagery.
In his essay about Serisier’s early work, Timothy Aistrope describes this series of work as follows:
“Serisier investigates one such narrative in Disenchanted World (Bus Gallery, 2008), a nostalgic meditation on how the modern drive to uncover nature, to rationalise it solely in terms of cause and effect, to derive first principles and bend them to our human ends, has distanced us from the environment and undermined it as a source of cultural meaning. Snapshot dioramas of classic pirate stories – the hunt for buried treasure, secret coves and caverns, a shipwrecked survivor on the raging seas – seem to ask ‘how can we respect nature if it is merely an object?’ Skilfully carved foam sculptures, a ragged galleon, a skull shaped outcrop, a racing night sky, are back-lit to create a mystic luminosity, throwing deep shadows and evoking the mystery and wonder of a buccaneer’s world lost forever to our instrumental modern mindset. Or, in the words of that neoWeberian Jack Sparrow, ‘the worlds the same size, there’s just less in it’. Emptied of cultural significance, nature now commonly hails as a utility, a resource, or, more broadly, as a combination of properties, processes, and effects.”