A Sardine Can Floating in the Ocean

Sophie Victoria

Essay by Sophie Victoria
 

It won’t stay still, and in doing so, it inhabits you. 

Their iridescent film — stretched, folded, crumpled — resists a single colour. Copper becomes teal. Rose bleeds into gold. One minute it looks solid, the next, transparent. A semblance of a painting underneath is there, but receding, showing only just enough to catch your attention. This is what the phenomenon of lustre does best. Before you decide to look, that decision has already been made for you. An act of looking, and also being looked at.

In the 1920s, a young man went fishing with his friend. The glistening of a sardine can bobbing on the surface caught his eye. He asked his friend: “Petit-Jean! Where is it? Where is that bright light coming from?” His friend laughed: “You can’t see it, but it can see you!” The young man was not amused. In fact, it disturbed him so profoundly that the sardine can stayed with him for many years. He kept returning to the same question: how can the glistening of something so mundane become an object of intense desire? He remembered the unsettling feeling of being watched — of being held in a gaze he could not return. To his friend it was a joke. To the young man we now know as Jacques Lacan, it was something more uncanny: the subject does not simply look out at the world. The world looks back.

The entire time I have been working as a creative, from my time in advertising to practising fine art, I have also been in analysis –– particularly Lacanian style of analysis. The same associations that drive my aesthetic judgements feel akin to the process unfolding whilst in the chair. Both practices have helped shape my understanding of the multitudes contained within me. My work is a grounding process. A sinthome. And with time, I have come to see how these insights begin to explore the multitudes, contradictions, and wonders that shape society, culture, and human experience. The studio allows this to emerge through a material encounter — an embodied wanting that is free for my deepest curiosities to emerge through free association. It seems whimsical — I know — yet everything you see in this room is a product of that. This is where I situate the work: within the unstable territory between perception, imagination, and the language that anchors them into some form of subjective reality.

That encounter with the sardine can, I would learn in session, was foundational to Lacan’s theorisation of the Gaze, lustre, and the Lost Object, or the object-cause of desire (objet petit a) — a theorisation that subsequently came to describe this wanting curiosity of mine. That glistening — light — is registered to us at a state of operation beneath rational thought; a fast, pre-conscious calculation. The specular highlight. The catch of light as an object moves. Evolution says: water, ripe fruit, metal, predator. Contemporary consumer culture says: new, clean, sexy, delicious. Shimmering, glossy surfaces, the cadence of a voice, bright lights, the vibration, chime, or echo that signals engagement — these are not mere aesthetics. They are inherited reflexes routed through a commercial infrastructure that has spent a hundred years learning the body’s responses.

A Sardine Can Floating in the Ocean creates psychological and perceptual conditions similar to those weaponised through contemporary image culture, where spectacle, affective presence, and mobile and mercurial images increasingly mediate how identity, desire, and reality itself are experienced. Moving across painting, optical illusion, sound, moving image, and mechanical intervention, I transform the gallery into an affective environment — one designed to steal your attention. Feeding the senses before conscious thought has the chance to intervene and assign meaning to it. Perception here is not passive. It is organised, manipulated, accelerated, and held in tension with the slowness of the tradition of viewing contemporary art.

Lustre, Desire, and the Gaze

It is interesting how the language around consumer culture uses the same signifiers we might use to describe basic primal instincts of the body. Hunger — Feed. Thirst — Lust. Consume — Binge. Bait — Prey.

Unfortunately, when psychoanalysis gave form to the unconscious in this idea that we possess a ‘self’, the drivers of consumerism were birthed under the capitalists’ playbook, which dictates that anything with a form can be sold. It has slowly since evolved from the commodification of objects toward the commodification of our body and self: selling fantasy, parasocial relationships, stealing our attention, and engineering affect. Images no longer function merely as representations of commodities; they become emotional infrastructures that shape identity itself. Desire is no longer directed toward possessing a thing, but toward inhabiting an image of oneself — fantasy; an imagined wholeness — a drive required to endure reality rather than to escape it.

The algorithmic feed is a continuous proliferation of fantasy. The scroll of the feed, the soft pulse of notification sounds, the sheen of polished surfaces, the cadence of aspirational language — all operate beneath deliberate cognition. The body absorbs these conditions unconsciously. What appears static is, in fact, atmospheric. This echoes the Debordian idea that social relations are now mediated through images rather than direct lived experience. Yet within digital culture, spectacle no longer feels distant or theatrical. It feels more intimate. More covert. More entrenched. We grasp the spectacle in our hands; it’s attached to our wrists, flashing past as we move through space. The “feed”: a sequence of images and signs that feed us this phantasmal existence.

My painting, albeit all of my work, inhabits the language of the spectacle. They deliberately frustrate the legibility expected of the static image. In doing so, they insist upon physical encounter. They insist upon presence. They emerge through layers of concealment and material choices that I don’t immediately rationalise when I see it. I want it. That wanting is quite difficult to explain — to be perfectly frank. Painting for me is equally instinctual and ineffable, yet it is also vulnerable. I sometimes wonder if I am subconsciously hiding them; wrapping them in an artificial skin. A veil. The holographic vinyl turns what would be a banal static painting into something mobile. Something alive. Their appearance is mutable; dependent upon movement, light, and bodily proximity. Responding to the ambience of their environment; light, weather, adjacent objects — but also to who is viewing them; their mood, memories, desires, subjectivity. I think of these surfaces as unstable mirrors; another body. Another version of me; or  you.

At the same time, the seductive qualities of their materiality — plastic and synthetic polymer paint— cannot be separated from the systems they critique. They shimmer with the same unconscious drive — the glint; the object cause of desire — as do luxury branding, AI imagery, and post-media content creation. Their seduction is very real and primal.

Desire is driven around lack, or the idea that we are not complete — something missing that continuously pulls us toward an imagined wholeness. The lack is real; however, the object cause of desire is an illusion. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so to speak, just as the glint in the ocean was just a banal piece of trash. Without desire there would be no will to live, however oxymoronically, it can lead us so far into fantasy that it can kill us. This is why it is sometimes referred to as the Death Drive. But like all things, moderation is key. In concealing the paintings, I create lack. In making them shimmer, I recreate that object cause of desire just like that sardine can floating in the ocean for Lacan, shimmering under the pressure of the Gaze that catches your eye. Remembering that the Gaze is not simply what we look at, but the psycho-social point at which we recognise that we are being looked at in return: by culture, by language, by nature, by the Other –– and how we respond to that act of being looked at. 

The Illusion of Reality

Light — and now sound — have played a crucial role in creating this sense of spectacular ambience. At the centre of the gallery sits m01her — named after the psychoanalytic concept of the first Other we encounter — our mothers and mother nature — but also the Real. m01her is a visual hologram and soundscape constructed from social media feeds, historical advertisements, jingles, and recordings, all distorted and stretched beyond recognition until they resemble something intended for ambient relaxation — or thrill. Atmospheric and haunting, the row of LED fans produces an optical illusion that intensifies this feeling of dissociation through the persistence of vision. Light has a symbolic association with life, and we are naturally drawn to it. Their illusory motion mimics the hypnosis of screens. Fragments of appropriated content become glitched, stripped from their original contexts, and reorganised — revealing both themselves and the mechanism that drives them. Like the feed, the motion of the fans evokes desire similar to the addictive quality of scrolling. We are not really sure of what it is we are truly desiring, but nonetheless we are pleasured by the act of seeking it.

Reality is capricious. Throughout my academic studies, I became interested in the idea that representation no longer reflects reality but begins to replace and generate it. Contemporary image culture feels this way to me. The distinction between authentic and artificial experience begins to collapse. The Real begins to show itself in the disorganisation of signs. Within this condition, perception becomes increasingly vulnerable to amplification, distortion, and recursive desire. In a way, this idea feels inherently schizophrenic. Manic even. There have been moments in my life where the fabric of reality has collapsed — where the world felt electrically charged, over-signified, too connected, too alive, to the point where I felt myself slip. As if a veil had been lifted to reveal the nature of everything. Having experienced reality’s failure personally, I feel deeply compelled to piece it back together — to make sense of this world I encountered. My works are not meant to represent psychosis literally — for that is impossible — but to echo their philosophical architecture of which I try to comprehend it within. It is the most fascinating thing to think about from a distance, and equally the most terrifying when it consumes me. The work is not about it, but it is the vantage point from where the works begin. For me, m01her behaves almost psychotically. It dissociates your body first, and familiar visual languages become estranged through distortion, abstraction, and sensory overload. Perception itself begins to glitch. Fear and awe become part of the spectacle, and for thrill-seekers like me, a means of escape.

In Conclusion

My works return repeatedly to these unstable, yet thrilling conditions. Reflective surfaces, strobing lights, and soundscapes fold the body into the work’s shifting perceptual field. The viewer does not simply consume the image; they are consumed by it, with an intensity that reaches the level of the incomprehensible; the corporeal, the Real. What emerges is an environment where perception can never fully stabilise into a singular reality. Instead, the works operate through interference — optical, sonic, emotional, psychological. They acknowledge the power of the atmospheres we consume, whether simulated or real — and to move through them is to encounter the conditions through which reality itself is experienced.

- Sophie Victoria

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