Public Eye (i)
Woollahra GalleryIn a polluted post-truth era, internet traffic and visibility are heavily intertwined with heightened emotions. Pulled in by our devices, we navigate a hyper-normalised world of mirrors and projection surfaces, orbiting around one another, never colliding. Unable to log off, we find connection through categories and avatars. Absentmindedly identifying with aesthetics, social capital, and the making or spending of money. Drama/spectator. Celebrity/follower. Fame/infamy. Social capital/attention economy.
Public Eye(i) asks what is scripted in our lives? Who gets to log off? Who is speaking through me? And who is speaking through you?
Exhibition Essay by Chris Ko
What remains of the mechanised self(i), in circulation
Yanti Peng is an artist defying easy categorisation. Her medium is the feeling of being inside a networked world while also stubbornly having a body, the vertigo of a moment when online and offline has ceased to matter. Public Eye(i) inhabits the low, eerie register of a technofeudal world crowded with undiagnosed selves and half-belongings, a time capsule for the fatigued but not yet fully alienated, in which something real is persistently superimposed on unreality.
The exhibition’s opening night performance, Flesh vs Brain, places us before a body suspended between transmitter and reception. Performer Kade Power, dressed in nude mesh and white casings, moves through the gallery android-like and uncanny. Musician Sy Dyson, his back to the room, watches only through Power’s Meta Glasses livestream on a small screen—her perception distilled into a perpetual broadcast. As Dyson composes piano music in real-time response, each informs the other in a loop that blurs cause and effect, their mutual activation mirroring the surveillance we have normalised: systems that fail to meet the growth of our own will, instead becoming our synthetic brain as their signals are mistaken for our own.
Across the gallery, Peng’s installations fold nostalgia into simulation. Traditional and digital media coalesce into something that functions as both homage and eulogy: two acrylic paintings, a looping animation, a Perspex hand model mechanised by a Raspberry Pi, clenching and unclenching. A teddy bunny rescued from the artist’s own childhood anchors the exhibition in lived memory. The painting Can’t Get You Out of my Head, pulses in bright colour, also adapted from a video game Peng played as a child. Much like the seduction of autofiction, the curated self on display is both intimate and abstracted; a deliberate collapse of distance between author and subject through a personal vitality layered with an engineered New Future Order that is neither bright nor fully dystopic.
The centrepiece animation, new.life, follows a protagonist who traverses an immersive virtual reality RPG, plugged into the game through inserting a cable from her computer directly into her ear. Barely satire, the gesture is not one that reaches for the future or mourns the past, but of unremarkable adaptation—which may be more unsettling. Peng holds absurdity and grief in the same frame, capturing the quiet surrender of choosing to log on, outsourcing the work of knowing and feeling, and the masochism of deriving a sort of pleasure from this helplessness. The seam between the sacred and the technological has all but dissolved; the visual grammar of video games structures not only social media but identity itself.
In a transparency society the self is overexposed, endlessly performing its own legibility, looping in circulation until beyond recognition. Living inside the image economy, the image outlasts its referent. Public Eye(i) doesn’t ask you to feel good or bad about this world where feeling itself is degraded. After exploiting every act of self-expression, the body remains, the signal continues, and yet something is already gone.
Exhibition Performance Activation
Costume by Hazel Sherritt
Prompts for Kade Power (Performer)
• 5 coins to collect, 4 in room, 1 near sy
• Every time you pick up a coin adorn yourself with the pigments embedded within it
• Inspect the work closest to the coin before you move onto the next
• Whilst moving take time to look and feel the audience within the room
• Once you collect all the coins go back to the starting fabric
Prompts for Sy Dyson (Musician)
• Everytime Kade picks up a new coin change dramatically the sound (pitch, tone and all)
b&w photos by Nolan Ho Wang Murphy
digicam photos by ‘Ana Ika
Exhibition Special Thanks:
Michael Blake
Johnathan Lo
Jesse Vega
Yuta Matsumara (installer)
Sep Pourbozorgi
Maya Martin-Westheimer
