Season 4 Episode 6, London x LAILA, Sydney
Christina May Carey, Michael Sandford
Season 4 Episode 6 and LAILA present a duo booth featuring two emerging stars of Australian art, Christina May Carey and Michael Sandford. Carey exhibits Rattails (2024), a video installation in which she assembles a cluster of handheld screens—iPhones and iPads— entangled by looping cables that spill across the floor like strands of hair or tails. On each screen, close-up moving images of rats’ tails flicker and repeat, creating a dense field of motion, texture, and rhythm. The installation draws attention to the act of looking itself. Multiple screens operate simultaneously, fragmenting vision and dispersing the viewer’s gaze across competing points of focus. This distributed way of seeing echoes the logic of contemporary surveillance systems, where observation is multiplied, continuous, and often unnoticed.
Rather than presenting surveillance as a fixed technology, Carey approaches it as a condition— an atmosphere of constant visibility shaped by everyday devices. The familiar tools of personal media become instruments of watching, implicating the viewer in a loop of attention, monitoring, and repetition. Rattails situates the body, technology, and image within a shared nervous system, asking how intimacy, control, and unease circulate through the networks that now mediate how we see and are seen.
Similarly, Michael Sandford’s images—unfixed chalk drawings on found chalkboards—explore the visuals of surveillance. Using images derived from compromised CCTV cameras worldwide, Sandford spends up to six months creating highly detailed renderings of the recovered photographs by hand. In this process, Sandford reintroduces the act of looking into mechanical forms of “watching,” merging the human and automated. Additionally, the works mine “slippages between something hidden and yet public,” casting the viewer as at once voyeur and active participant; the camera is private, but with its content made public, the image shared with the viewer is ultimately a shared one.