Phantom Operator

Natalie Synnott

16 - 20 June

Please join us for the opening celebration Thursday 18th June 6-8pm

Phantom Operator explores the immense energetic potential of the body and asks what happens when these forces are captured and redirected toward self-surveillance, efficiency and economic surplus. Using found imagery, sculpture, and gestural painting, Phantom Operator investigates how attention, desire, imagination, and subjectivity are increasingly shaped by technological and economic structures that operate unconsciously within us.

Drawing from image-based psychology, theories of desire, and contemporary critiques of optimisation culture, the works approach the image from an Archetypal Psychological lens, not just as a fixed representation but as a living environment capable of transforming both viewer and maker. Archival photographs, instructional media, forgotten internet ephemera, and fragmented bodies are ruptured and reanimated through processes of repetition, rupture, and reconstruction. Through this process the works can become ambiguous and indecipherable, demanding further examination in order to be understood and refusing automatic processing.

The rhythm and contrasting of active and passive figures explore the tension between the body's innate intelligence and potential against the systems that seek to organise, optimise, and exploit it. Positioned between ritual and system,  Phantom Operator questions what forms of intelligence have been neglected and subdued in modern life and whether ambiguity, ritual and embodied experience can endure as a tethering force to our humanness in a data driven landscape.