This so-called Klamm may not have the smallest trait in common with the real one, the resemblance may not exist except in the eyes of Barnabas, half-blinded by fear, he may be the lowest of the officials, he may not even be an official at all, but all the same he has some work of some kind to perform at the desk, he reads something or other in his great book, he whispers something to the clerk, he thinks something when his eye falls on Barnabas once in a while, and even if that isn't true and he and his acts have no significance whatever, he has at least been set there by somebody for some purpose. All that simply means that something is there, something which Barnabas has the chance of using, something or other at the very least; and it is Barnabas's own fault if he can't get any farther than doubt and anxiety and despair.

-- Franz Kafka, The Castle

Sean Alward and Heidi May engage with desires to identify and to be recognized. Their work responds to conditions that began to develop with the consolidation of telecommunications networks and became entrenched with the realization of the Global Market. Social relations, as they continue to be mediated by images/signs/representations, share a limbo inhabited by experts, lobbyists and bad-actors-turned-politicians. This is where confirmations and denials are instantaneous and murder is posited as a pre-emptive necessity. Contradictory assessments of value are lauded at the same time, or at different times by the same sources. Under these conditions, time, space and history are displaced. The paranoid masochism captured so vividly in the writing of Franz Kafka is now a normative state of mind, and that state of mind has become a repetition of tedious clichŽs. How do you identify yourself? Who do you think you are? What are you looking at? Who is looking at you? What constitutes an authority of the real?

Sean and Heidi take these questions and conditions as a starting point for returning to some of the promises of transcendence and reflection visual art has made since the Enlightenment. They experiment with the possibility of losing oneself Ð of being liberated from consciousness Ð as well as being lost in contemplation. I would like to thank Heather Passmore for her sensitive and insightful text about these explorations. I'd also like to thank Heidi and Sean for their commitment to their respective practices and their involvement with the Helen Pitt Gallery.

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