Created across distance between Brisbane and New York where the artist currently lives, Julian Day’s installation at IMA Belltower examines the power of instruction as a medium, and the embedded tensions between personal liberty and social duty.
Please scream inside your heart utilises commercial signage and exploits its quotidian relationship to the abundance of information and caution that now rules our lives in these unprecedented times.
The hyperbolic and sometimes fanciful texts displayed on these LED surfaces are drawn from Day’s decade-long interest in instructional scores—melding seminal works of performance art, with snippets of the news cycle, and (as the title of the work suggests) the new vocabulary of the global pandemic. These contradictory, even impossible statutes cast a caustic eye on our current circumstances, questioning the ethics of delegation and command, and whether we have the right to resist, negotiate, or talk back to power.
Julian Day, Please scream inside your heart, 2020. This project was co-commissioned by Brisbane Festival. Brisbane Festival is an initiative of the Queensland Government and Brisbane City Council.
