Giselle Stanborough is a Sydney-based intermedia artist whose work combines online and offline elements to address how user-generated media encourage us to identify and perform notions of self, and the relationship between connectivity and isolation. Motivated by a curiosity in the increasing indeterminacy between the private and public spheres, Stanborough’s work often addresses contemporary interpersonal experiences concerning technology, feminism and consumer capitalism.
Stanborough’s ‘Cinopticon’ – which was commissioned by Carriageworks as part of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship – is fully installed at Carriageworks and has been transformed into a digital offering following the closure of the Sydney multi-arts centre to the public, in line with COVID-19 restrictions.
The online experience of the exhibition, supported by a regularly updated public program, is accessed via the Carriageworks Journal and includes artist diaries, artist and curator ‘in conversations’, playlists, video content and exhibition imagery supplemented with curatorial insights. Carriageworks plans to release new online content weekly, including an interactive art-wall, curatorial essays and a new video work created by Stanborough exclusively for Carriageworks Journal.
‘Cinopticon’ draws on internet narcissism, corporate surveillance and the manipulation of social media algorithms. It is an immersive performance installation in which audiences see their reflection in unpredictable ways – how we currently find ourselves; at home and socially distant, seeing ‘Cinopticon’ from afar.
Stanborough said: ‘Bringing aspects of the work online is a challenging task because whilst the work was about the internet, ‘Cinopticon’ used physical presence, both mine and the audiences, as an essential element. Whilst the form in which the work is experienced being different, I believe the ideas that inspired me through the development of ‘Cinopticon’ are more important than ever.’
‘Cinopticon’ contemporises Foucault’s theory of the ‘panopticon’, a model of surveillance where the few watch and control the many. In the physical exhibition, the artist uses searchlights, sculptural forms, colossal wall diagrams and mirrored digital surfaces to reflect the performative experience of social media platforms. As the subject and object of her own system of visual scrutiny, Stanborough is the ghost in her own machine. She haunts its house of mirrors, trapped as a digital apparition at the bottom of the well.
Stanborough’s ‘Cinopticon’ is made possible with funds from the Estate of the late, Italian-born Australian artist, Katthy Cavaliere (1972-2012). Announced in October 2018, The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship awarded $100,000 to each of the three female artists, Giselle Stanborough, Sally Rees (Mona) and Frances Barrett (ACCA) to create ambitious new work focused at the intersection of installation and performance art practice.
