Zoë Croggon and the Discipline of Seeing

It was early afternoon on a hot summer day, the kind that sharpens the edges of Brunswick—heat rising off the asphalt, the air carrying a faint metallic dryness, the suburb’s usual bustle thinned into glare. Weston Street sits slightly aside from the theatre of Sydney Road: a working strip of low industrial façades and converted warehouses where doors are practical, signage is minimal, and you arrive by looking twice. Daine Singer occupies one of these re-made buildings at 83 Weston Street—an old industrial shell renovated into a contemporary gallery, its frontage now defined by large glass doors where a roller door once would have been. You step out of the brightness and into a cooler, quieter register, as if the street’s heat has been edited out rather than simply left behind.

Inside, the temperature drops and the visual field narrows. Daine Singer’s gallery is compact, white, and spare, its scale immediately felt rather than announced. The proportions shape movement quietly: how close you stand, how long you pause, when you step back. Light is even and unsentimental; sound recedes. Nothing directs the eye urgently from one work to the next. Instead, the room establishes a tempo. You become aware of your posture, your pacing, the way attention drifts and recalibrates. The exhibition does not perform. It holds.

This atmosphere is fundamental to Asleep on Watch (8 November–20 December 2025), an exhibition by the Australian visual artist Zoë Croggon. The show unfolds less as a sequence of discrete works than as a condition—one that asks the viewer to remain alert without expecting clarity or resolution. What is staged here is not revelation but vigilance: the quiet, uneasy awareness that accompanies being watched and watching at the same time, often without knowing precisely how or why.

The title Asleep on Watch suggests failure, dereliction, a lapse in duty. But it also names a more ambiguous state: a form of attention that persists even as consciousness dulls, a condition in which observation continues without reflection. This doubleness runs through the exhibition. Croggon’s works do not accuse or expose. They do not rely on dramatic confrontation or overt critique. Instead, they operate through restraint—through juxtaposition, repetition, and the disciplined structure of the diptych. This restraint is not incidental; it is the inquiry itself, asking how visual systems organise perception long before questions of ethics or responsibility are consciously engaged. It is this foundational concern—how seeing becomes a mechanism of governance—that unites the exhibition.

Although Asleep on Watch addresses surveillance, it is not organised around surveillance as a singular theme. Rather, it examines a broader set of visual habits shared across systems of order: choreography, mapping, abstraction, notation, and the conversion of bodies and landscapes into legible form. Surveillance appears here as one manifestation of these habits—an extension rather than their origin.

This inquiry is grounded in Croggon’s longstanding practice. She has consistently examined the relationship between the body, its environment, and the systems that organise both. Working across photography, collage, printmaking, video, and installation, she has developed a sustained focus on the trained body—dancers, athletes, figures caught mid-movement—and the architectural and spatial frameworks that shape them. In her work, movement is rarely presented as freedom. It is shown as disciplined, optimised, regulated. Architecture and landscape function not as neutral backdrops but as active forces that condition how bodies appear, move, and are read. From this foundational engagement with the body, Croggon extends her lens outward.

Across her practice, Croggon has repeatedly returned to the diptych as a structuring device, using it to stage relationships rather than conclusions: body and diagram, land and abstraction, gesture and system. This formal strategy is central to Asleep on Watch, where juxtaposition becomes a way of thinking. Meaning does not reside in either image alone but in the interval between them. The works do not explain themselves; they ask to be held in tension.

In this exhibition, Croggon extends her inquiry beyond the body to encompass land, infrastructure, and the photographic apparatus itself. Photography is treated not merely as a representational medium but as an operational one: a technology that fixes, abstracts, and distances. Crucially, Croggon resists technological spectacle. There are no screens, no live feeds, no immersive projections. Instead, she works through still images, found photographs, domestic drone footage, and the repeated logic of the diptych. Surveillance is not dramatised. It is normalised.

This strategy becomes particularly evident in the works addressing Pine Gap, the joint Australian–United States surveillance base located on Arrernte Country in the Northern Territory, eighteen kilometres from Alice Springs. Pine Gap is one of the most significant intelligence facilities in the world, yet its operations remain largely invisible, conducted through signals, coordinates, and remote interpretation. Croggon approaches this site obliquely, not through exposure or documentation, but through displacement.

In the lithograph diptych Altona Beach / Pine Gap (by Mick Tsikas), the familiar openness of Altona Beach in Naarm/Melbourne is placed alongside Pine Gap. Rendered in black and white and presented vertically, the images resist narrative sequencing. Their force lies not in opposition but in equivalence. The pairing quietly unsettles: the same visual logic governs leisure and militarised observation alike. Distance, framing, and abstraction flatten difference. Pine Gap is not positioned as remote or exceptional, but as implicated—visually, politically, and ethically—in the environments it occupies.

This equivalence points to a deeper, more troubling synergy. The logic of leisure photography—framing, selecting, aestheticising a view for personal consumption—is not a respite from surveillance but shares its underlying grammar of extraction and control. Coast and desert, domestic space and military infrastructure, are yoked together by this visual economy. From a distance, everything becomes surface. Decisions made through intercepted signals and remote analysis are enacted far from their consequences, yet remain materially embedded in the land itself.

Pine Gap functions within the exhibition not as an isolated subject but as a conceptual anchor. It exemplifies a mode of seeing that privileges distance, abstraction, and authority—qualities that recur throughout the show in less overt forms. The logic governing military surveillance shares a visual grammar with agricultural mapping, domestic aerial imaging, and choreographic notation. In this sense, Pine Gap is not exceptional but symptomatic.

Alongside military surveillance, Asleep on Watch attends to the domestication of the surveillant gaze. Several works draw on found photographs and footage captured via a domestic drone, collapsing distinctions between private observation and institutional monitoring. The drone appears not as advanced technology but as an ordinary consumer device—one that quietly extends aerial vision into everyday life. In Croggon’s hands, this familiarity is precisely the point. Practices once associated with state power now circulate casually within domestic space, complicating ideas of autonomy, consent, and resistance.

This logic extends decisively into the management of land itself. This is clearest in After Image (barley, wheat, pistachio crops) (2025). One panel presents an aerial photograph of cultivated land, segmented into irregular plots. From above, the terrain dissolves into pattern. Fields become shapes; boundaries become lines. Productivity replaces presence. Paired with this is an image of hands pressing into a rounded form, suggesting kneading or gestation. The photograph insists on proximity and touch, introducing friction between distance and embodiment.

The title After Image evokes not only optical residue but ethical persistence. The tactile image lingers within the abstraction, refusing erasure. Questions of labour, nourishment, and dependency reverberate through this pairing. The aerial view renders the land manageable, readable, optimised; the image of hands reintroduces effort and vulnerability. Together, they suggest that the same visual systems that promise efficiency also obscure the human and ecological costs embedded in the landscape.

Throughout the exhibition, the body appears as a site where systems become visible. In Origami (2025), a falling figure is paired with folded paper, its creases echoing the contours of limbs. Flesh becomes form; movement becomes structure. What is at stake is not movement itself but its capture—how motion is arrested, analysed, and translated. This recalls motion-capture technologies in animation and biomechanics, where the live body is rendered as malleable data.

In Wishbone (2025), a dancer’s extended body is paired with a diagram of intersecting curves. Anatomical notation and abstract mapping converge. The diagram does not merely describe the body; it proposes an ideal of efficiency and extension, recalling the ergonomic studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor and the choreographic notation of Rudolf Laban. The dancer’s body is both subject and instrument—caught between expression and compliance.

V Formation (2025) presents a pegged sheet of paper against an open sky, its folded shape echoed by a loosely organised flock of birds. The reference to military formation is unmistakable, yet the pattern resists precision. Deviation interrupts order. Coordination, Croggon suggests, always carries the possibility of rupture.

In Blind Eye (2025), the exhibition’s ethical tension becomes explicit. A softly rendered body folds inward, partially obscured by grain and tonal diffusion. Seeing here does not produce knowledge; it produces deflection. The work names a familiar condition of contemporary visual culture: recording without acknowledging, witnessing without responsibility. The grain functions not as decoration but as noise—the buffer that allows images to circulate without consequence. Optics remain active; ethical consciousness recedes.

If Blind Eye addresses personal complicity, Black Sun (2025) turns toward symbolic power. A curving body completes the arc of a darkened sun. The figure appears strained rather than triumphant. Abstract symbols exert pressure on lived bodies. The work inverts traditional symbolism: the body does not command the symbol but is contorted by it, suggesting how individuals are bent to fit totalising ideological narratives.

The installation reinforces these concerns through an economy of means. Works are evenly spaced and held to a consistent scale. Nothing announces itself as a centrepiece. The repetition of the diptych establishes a measured rhythm, encouraging lateral rather than linear movement through the space. Images are encountered, left behind, and re-encountered in altered relation.

This rhythm is intensified by the architecture of the gallery itself. Low concrete beams interrupt sightlines, preventing the space from being grasped in a single glance. Vision is repeatedly deferred. Meaning is assembled incrementally and imperfectly.

What distinguishes this spatial control from conventional exhibition design is its proximity to the logic of surveillance itself. Surveillance rarely operates through dramatic intervention; it regulates movement, distributes attention unevenly, allows certain views while denying others. The gallery’s interruptions echo this logic. Vision is managed quietly, through structure rather than force.

Rather than positioning the viewer outside the system, Asleep on Watch places them within it. Movement through the space is neither free nor overtly constrained, but subtly shaped. One becomes aware, often belatedly, of adjusting pace, angle, and duration in response to the room’s limits. Surveillance appears not as spectacle, but as environment.

In recent years, exhibitions addressing surveillance and aerial vision have often foregrounded technological display—satellite imagery, drone footage, algorithmic mapping—positioning the viewer as an informed witness. Asleep on Watch operates differently. By refusing spectacle and working through stillness and repetition, Croggon shifts attention from exposure to internalisation. Surveillance is not revealed as something external; it is recognised as a visual logic already embedded in everyday ways of seeing.

As John Kinsella writes in the exhibition catalogue, Asleep on Watch is “an exhibition about viewing and messages—about how we interpret signals both in their presented, predictive modes and through the hidden.” Croggon sustains this condition without resolution. The exhibition offers no catharsis. It asks viewers to remain attentive—to recognise how seeing itself participates in systems of power.

Leaving the gallery, the world outside feels subtly altered. Surveillance no longer appears as distant infrastructure, confined to bases, satellites, or screens. It registers instead in small adjustments of attention—in how bodies are read, how space is scanned, how a glance becomes an assessment. Asleep on Watch offers no alarm. It leaves the viewer with a more unsettling recognition: that vigilance does not begin with watching more closely, but with acknowledging how seeing—so often assumed to be neutral—already carries responsibility for the structures it silently upholds.

Exhibition details
Zoë Croggon: Asleep on Watch
Daine Singer, 83 Weston Street, Brunswick, Melbourne
8 November–20 December 2025