Artwork: For the birds?, 2022, Jacinta Giles, digital print on removable vinyl, 2.34m x 6.4m.
We are delighted to see Jacinta Giles’ work For the birds? included in Platform Arts’ group exhibition Acts of Translation showing from 22 April - 19 May, 2023 in Geelong, Victoria.
In ‘For the Birds’ (1981), American artist and composer John Cage (1912–92) told interviewer Daniel Charles that questions should “preserve us from all the logical minimisations that we are at each instant tempted to apply to the flux of events.” The artist believing that it is in the ‘meanwhile’—the paying attention to world around us and being aware of what we often ignore (which he discussed in ‘Silence’)—that could open us up to the complexity of our environment.
In collaging disparate photographs together, of the moving images that fill our screens, this work pays homage to Cage’s belief in revealing ‘meanwhile’ spaces through allowing what whirls around us to be heard (in this case seen). With the photographs in this work developed through chance, and having removed these once moving-images from their original narrative context, these images now present themselves indeterminately. Leading the viewer to consider more deeply what is occurring simultaneously in the world around us and raising more questions than answers.