Dissemblance explores the idea that photography can absorb images of reality and return them to the viewer as signs of the elusive spectres that haunt the fringes of our daily lives. In using unconventional photographic processes that take their cues from how memory operates, what emerges is a materiality analogous to the graininess of broadcast transmissions. Images arising from and dissolving into another to form a second order reality. Memory, witnessing and the affective power of our shared visual culture are all examined within this project. While Giles’ practice has focused on printed photographic works, this residency will see the translation of this into moving image works, a medium of apparitions intertwined with our memories.
For Jacinta’s residency project, Dissemblance, Giles was working in isolation and limiting her materials, foregoing physical prints to produce a moving image works. Responding directly to COVID 19, this new video work manipulates and combines images of the domestic environment, with an emphasis on its screens and their mediation of this crisis.
The work captures the inward gaze of a renewed attention to the domestic environment alongside a restless and insistent gaze outward via screens: scrolling, switching and processing a constant stream of media, a source of connection and disconnection. The work is a snapshot into the uncertainty of the unfolding present, and an expression of, and reflection on, the anxiety and grief that has accompanied this.
Jacinta Giles is an emerging Australian visual artist who uses the materiality and conceptual framework of photography to explore the impermanent, mutable and fragmentary nature of memory.
Through using unconventional photographic processes that take their cues from how memory operates, Giles creates images that speak to the affective and shared visual nature of remembrances. In subverting photographic temporality — the idea that a photograph represents a single moment in time — her work could be considered an archiving of memory traces and lost recollections. Giles has exhibited in galleries across Australia and in London and graduated with a Master of Visual Art from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, in 2016.
Artist website: www.jacintagiles.com
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