Glen Seator (1956-2002) was an American visual artist and conceptual sculptor. He lived in Brooklyn, NY and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Early life
Born Glen Thomas Seator in 1956 in Beardstown, Illinois to mother, Dr. Lynette Hubbard Seator (d. 2012), a professor of Modern Languages, and father Gordon Douglas Seator (d. 1988), a judge. While growing up his family lived in the small community of Mount Sterling. During his lifetime, Seator had three sisters, Patricia, Penelope and Pamela.
Education
Seator attended high school in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he skipped a year. Upon graduation, he used earnings from minimum-wage employment to travel throughout the world for nine months. Upon returning to the U.S., Seator earned a BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston in 1984, and a MFA from SUNY Purchase in 1989. Prior to that he attended the Cooper Union, New York, from 1981 to 1982.
Career and exhibitions
Seator was well known in the 1990s and early 2000s for his architecture-inspired installations and architectural interventions. Seator's work has been compared to other conceptual sculptors, Robert Gober and Charles Ray and has affinities to some of the work of Bruce Nauman. In his full-scale architectural reconstructions, the artist addressed the delicate balance of place, power and position. In an interview with the architectural historian, Anthony Vidler, Seator stated that a primary influence was the work of Gordon Matta Clark. The art historian Adam Weinberg has written that Seator's sculptural work had "a dramatic kinesthetic effect which may bring on vertigo."
Seator also produced sculptural procedure-based process artworks, such as the sweep-action piece, Untitled Auditorium Installation (1993) at MoMA PS1 in Queens, NY, as well as the transformation of a townhouse he owned in the historical neighborhood of Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn into a work of installation art. Seator also created large panoramic photo-installations dealing with the landscape and "emptiness" of the desert; the vernacular architecture of Echo Park, Los Angeles and the pristine architectural storefronts of Beverly Hills, California. Seator's first solo exhibition was in New York, followed by major installations in Warsaw, Vienna, San Francisco, London and Basel. In 2000-2001 his work was featured in a two-person exhibition, The Architectural Unconscious: James Casebere and Glen Seator, at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. The show traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.
Seator's first one-person shows were held in New York City in 1991, at the SculptureCenter and Art in General. He went on to have solo exhibitions at the Kunstraum Wien, Vienna, Austria; Kunsthalle Basel; White Columns; and at several art galleries including Jay Joplin/White Cube, London; Burnett Miller Gallery, Los Angeles; and Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles. His work was included in group exhibitions at Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY among others.
His most recent work at the time of his death were large-scale panoramic photographs of landscapes and urban street-scenes.
Significant works
Interrupted Sweeping, (1993). At PS1 Museum in Long Island City, Queens, Seator enacted a long-term procedural action in which he used sweeping compound to sweep the floor of the auditorium gallery. In time, the piles accumulated into larger and larger arrays of material. These piles of material held in a "perpetual state of interruption" were individually lit from the grid of ceiling lights that had been lowered on cords to hover just above the piles of dirt.
Preventative Measures, (1994). Installation at the National Gallery of Contemporary Art (Zaçheta), in Warsaw, Poland, Seator meticulously covered the ornate Neo-Renaissance-style salon walls with horizontal strips of masking tape, creating "an etherial yet overwhelming image of itself." The installation covered 8,000 square feet of wall space.
N.Y.O. + B. (New York Office and Ballroom), (1996). Commissioned by the New York Kunsthalle, was a full-scale replication of an office and bathroom, tilted on its side. The 10,000 pound off-kilter structure was anchored to the floor with three steel cables. In his essay, Glen Seator's Daring Desiring Machines art critic Terry R. Myers describes the work as "dangerous minimalism," and compares Seator's work to that of Bruce Nauman and Michael Asher.