Sean Lockwood

b. 1994 - Newark, Delaware, US

2016 BFA Maryland Institute College of Art
2019 MFA University of Washington

I'm interested in decision-making under conditions of partial information—the gaps, manipulations, and uncertainties that shape how we perceive and act. I work across photography, printmaking, and digital projects, using whatever means are available to engage with how images and information circulate, often through attention to context rather than resolution.

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Dimension: A4

Edition: 150

Paid was the name of an exhibition space that operated in Seattle, Washington between March 2022 and October 2023. The exhibition space was the garage attached to our home. The building was originally constructed in 1943 and located in the North Beacon Hill neighborhood of south Seattle. Exhibitions took place over two years and programming was funded by surplus income gained by us both while simultaneously employed as full-time technicians for the Photography department at the University of Washington School of Art. During this period artists including focus, Divya Mehra, Elizabeth VR, Christian Oldham, Jason Hirata, Flint Jamison, Park McArthur, and Julia Yerger/Wiley Guillot participated in exhibitions, with multiple performances also held by Elizabeth VR, Kieran Daly, and Charles Stobbs/Neo Gibson. Additionally, we thought it was appropriate to produce our own shows for the space.

For Nick’s show at Paid, he appropriated four institutional slide projectors and additional equipment to display an automatically cycling series of over 30 slides which each show a highly personalized tier list. Tier lists are an online tool for placing items belonging to discrete categories in hierarchical order of favorability. Each slide was produced by photographing digital compositions made intentionally with inverted colors and displayed on a computer screen with 35mm color reversal film, yielding a positive slide. Each projector was controlled by a central controller unit, randomizing the collection to appear across four white screens.

For Sean’s show at Paid, he produced a series of 11 framed silver gelatin prints. The prints were made with found 35mm cinema projection film reel containing the 30 second trailer for Arctic Tale, a 2007 documentary made narrativizing the lives of a family of polar bears. Individual frames were taken from the reel and enlarged in a darkroom to produce paper negatives from the positive film. The paper negatives were then contact printed to make positive prints. Compositions include polar bears in their arctic habitat as well as cinematic intertitles included in the trailer to promote the then upcoming release of the film.

Both projects were made under conditions of excess time and resources at work, and both projects coincidentally interface with a literal negative to positive conversion strategy. For the occasion of producing a show about Paid for Studio Speziale (coincidentally, almost exactly 1.5 years after the final exhibition at Paid and 1.5 years since the most recent exhibition at Studio Speziale), we thought of a gesture that would illustrate a larger narrative of this conversion by revealing our negative intermediary materials, however reconfigured this time directly interfacing with each other. While working on Paid, we constantly communicated over text despite living and working together, often from our separate bedrooms. Our frequent sharing of images started to transform into a practice of producing business cards. In general we always printed a new one for each exhibition at Paid and gave them away for free at the show.

After the first year of working on the space, Aurora San Miguel produced a thorough examination of the work of the artists and our context of Seattle in writing, which we compiled and printed in a small publication called Paywall. After the second year of Paid, Aurora conducted interviews with all of the artists. We intended to release the second issue of Paywall then, in 2023, but our circumstances quickly changed and we both left Seattle immediately after the last show.

Flint Jamison
Installation View
Paid
2023

Publishing: Device
Distributing: device.gmbh
Archival Printing: Device
Photographing: Nick Strobelt
Writing: Flint Jamison
Writing: Sean Lockwood
Copy Editing: Katherine Pickard
Designing: Flint Jamison
Laser Engraving: Sean Lockwood
Letterpress Printing: Flint Jamison
Woodcut Printing: Flint Jamison

Edition of 85

24 pages + Cover + Tip-ins + Slip sheets + Baggie

At the heart of Sean Lockwood’s Student Work Accompanied by Poster, 2023, there is an agreement. The agreement is between Sean Lockwood and Steve Kado, wherein a recently acquired cloud atlas in poster-form (Clouds: A Guide To The Sky, 2023) must be shown as a condition of exhibiting Lockwood’s video from 2016, NOTAM of Wind

The agreement exists because NOTAM of Wind, inspired by a hot air balloon simulator video game[1], was made in an art school context — itself a weird simulation of the reality of working and living as an artist. Lockwood felt that it would only make sense to show the video with some kind of acknowledgment of how different the context was from then to now. The work was made suspended between the poles of antipathy towards ‘making sculpture’ out of metal or wood and fascination with ‘ambient’ or ‘non-inflammatory images like hot air balloons, rainbows and the like.

The “non-inflammatory image” or “ambient image” remains at the core of both the video and the agreement. An ambient image is a picture that exist to show that pictures exist, placeholder or default images, pictures with a wide variety of colors and almost nothing personal or individual — a semiotic dead end. For a time, the hot air balloon was the ruler of this image kingdom. So ingrained was its use that imaging software company Corel used a hot air balloon on all their marketing and ad copy starting in the 80s because no other image could be all images and none more than a hot air balloon.

Perhaps the opposite of the ambient, non-inflammatory image is not the hyper-meaningful, charged and powerful image but the exemplary image, the draft animal of images, images that explain specific useful things: what to do if someone is choking, what plants are poisonous, what to watch out for when observing the weather. Based on the clouds, will it be safe to go up in the hot air balloon?

The placeholder image is changing: there now exists enough easily searchable stock photography that one can always be more precise in who and for what an image is to be used. There are so many images that now everyone can have their own. As such, the image of the hot air balloon is changing from something pleasant, colorful but unremarkable into something that is now gnomic, a gem produced by the great forces unleashed within the volcano of images that has been our 21st century so far.

[1] NOTAM of Wind is itself named after a Japanese hot air balloon simulator game for PlayStation1 made by a company with the unlikely but remarkable name ArtDink.

– Steve Kado

"Language follows clothing. Proper marketing technique dictates to us that products cannot simply exist and be bought--they must also be described. In any commercial context a step of knowing precedes purchasing. In an e-commerce context webpages should be filled appropriately with text here and there to function in the same way as dressing a boutique, stretching to ends of a rectangle as need be. Describing options or variations or suggested pairings or identifying solutions to identified problems requires some form of copy writing or numeric/non-numeric sizing information or color or short or long or style in order to describe the product. During my residency I was able to witness the tools, specifically computer keyboards, used for creating that description.

I've been really into typing games for some time now. I feel like a lot of people associate them with being young in school and learning touch-typing while being told how much of an essential skill it will be. I think it has mostly helped me with messaging comfortably. I like thinking about them more now because of how much they also feel like work simulators. Typing games typically consist of transcribing prescribed passages of text, and the game becomes a matter of copying these passages. Time management also plays a role because there are usually time constraints motivating you to finishing your copying quickly. All of the elements of industrial labor—repetition, accuracy, speed, etc. can be very straightforwardly encapsulated into a game to more or less pass time or feel busy. Games like these can also be an effective gauge for understanding storage solutions. Because the basic mechanic of any typing game hasn't ever needed to change, the same idea can be repackaged over and over again (maybe with slight variations on a theme) as new products. Every update in readable media formats occurring over the last few decades has shown that these kinds of products can be re-shoveled on to whatever tech, never questioning how much longer typing will be necessary. Only now as we see them disappearing from laptops do we see mechanical keyboards getting the final push into the tech fetish category of quirky peripherals. Their continued survival is an in-house chore, left to the domain of appliances whose design integrity will outlast them. Dishwashers can easily clean dust and food crumbs out of keyboards in one cycle.

At Prairie Underground, a once operational sauna fell victim to an illicit supply/demand chain concerning copper one night, rendering it defunct of its original use and relegating it to a storage closet. Since both a dishwasher and a sauna are on site, and because they both heat water to the same temperature when they're working, I wanted to introduce employee keyboards to them. So I went to the building at night, when I knew no one would be at work the next day, and removed employee keyboards from their work stations so that they could spend the following night, of the opening reception, in the sauna.

The playlist I made is for listening to while playing typing games. The music I chose to include in the playlist all comes from other video game soundtracks and is all composed by video game music composers. I tried to encapsulate the energy required to type fast and accurately in the tracks I selected. I eventually burned discs with the music playlist on it. For this I was mostly inspired by the backup of Prairie Underground Operations & Maintenance Manual to a CD.