Opening Sunday June 20th Betsy Lin Seder: Knowing The Word Doesn’t Do You Any Good On view: June 20–July 18, 2021 Gallery hours: Sundays 1pm–6pm (closed on July 4th) Niche Gallery is thrilled to present new work by Betsy Lin Seder. In ancient Greek culture, anagrams were seen as vessels for hidden meaning, and for scholars of the Talmud, they were tools for interpretation. Anagrams served as a key, a clue to unlock deeper understanding. In Knowing the Word Doesn’t Do You Any Good, Seder’s two-channel video, the artist uses a set of anagrams to structure a conversation between herself and her mother who has dementia, transposing one puzzle onto another. Mother and daughter cycle through terms and images starting from the word niche and adding anagrams of this French word: Chien (dog), Chine (China), and Cheni (an expression used in Switzerland that means disorder or mess). Her mother’s hands sort through cutout images and suggest a collage in the making, but nothing is ever affixed, continually shifting, like the words which no longer adhere to their referents. In line with a broader body of work about elegies and lamentations, Knowing the Word Doesn’t Do You Any Good explores the loss of short-term memory and the stories that emerge out of this confusion of time and meaning. Seder’s mother weaves in memories (some real, some not) and substitutes figures and places she knows with the images she sees. Certain pictures call her back when they trigger a memory or elicit her affection. As an artist and former teacher, her knowledge of images, love of analyzing photographs, and her tendencies as an educator are apparent. Each image becomes a point of connection; these new images, just introduced, are almost immediately referred to as old memories. The deep past, immediate past and the present are fused and flattened; her musings skirt around meaning, sometimes brush themselves under the rug, and rarely pinpoint. In parallel, one channel of the video moves forward while the other moves in reverse, mimicking the circular, repetitive and regressive nature of engaging in conversation with someone experiencing short-term memory loss. In addition to the video, Seder includes a lenticular image titled NICHECHIEN, a performative articulation of confusion—of seeing one thing for another, of scrambling and transposition. One side of the image shows a drawing of the goddess Ops standing in a niche, the other an image of a well-loved, and long dead family dog. At points distinct, they commingle, fade, and then separate again. The images become ghostly, tributaries of meaning leak, and new imagined scenes compress. In Knowing the Word Doesn’t Do You Any Good, Seder imagines her mother’s world as a mosaic of anagrams built from her surroundings, where meaning coalesces around whatever presents itself within her visual field. Still images, lived experience, and entirely imagined histories equalize, all available as material for the conversation at hand, allowing a composite reality to form. A momentary flash of that experience is available for viewers. Although familiar, knowing the word doesn’t do you any good. Betsy Lin Seder’s art explores spectral residue that lurks in the remnants, histories, and representations of sites and objects. It embraces and exploits confusion—of space, time, and vision—as a generative tool to reveal and reconsider. She uses repetition, mirrors, collage, re-photographing/re-printing to re-present and to de-familiarize. Seder has exhibited her work at galleries and institutions in the US, France, New Zealand, and Chile including Samuel Freeman Gallery, Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Headlands Center for the Arts, Laguna Art Museum, The Torrance Art Museum, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Seder has been an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Art Center, and an artist fellow at the Terra Foundation in Giverny, France. She has taught video and photography at Wellesley College, UC Riverside, Cal State Fullerton and USC.