by Paul Sutherland.

When encountering an exhibition titled Redaction Toolkit, which purports to respond loosely to “world events”, it’s hard not to think about the three million documents released by the US Department of Justice—and the other three million unreleased—pertaining to the activities of Jeffrey Epstein. For this reason, it’s important to consider what the purpose of redaction is in the broader political and visual culture of 2026. Specifically, I suggest that redaction, as the artists in this show have considered it and also as it functions in the Epstein Files, produces aura through omission. Conversely, that which is not redacted, by virtue of its sheer excess, obscures the capacity for real meaning to be derived at all.
        When history looks back at the release of the Epstein Files, it will be talked about as a particularly egregious example of a cover-up. The rich and powerful around the world seemed to have had connections to this man, knew of his crimes, did business with him, and said nothing for decades. The documents revealing the extent of his relationships became instantly notorious for their pages upon pages of black rectangles—redactions spuriously protecting Epstein’s victims, but largely working to conceal the identities of his associates. In his article for Spike magazine, Travis Diehl speaks to the allurements implicated in redacted images, stating that,

Redactions also sustain a kind of speculation, conspiracy, suspicion. They seem to prove through omission that something important and revelatory is being hidden. It’s an article of faith that the black rectangles are concealing something, or someone.[1]

It seems, then, that in an era defined by an oversaturation of images, aura is produced by the act of redaction rather than the moment of revelation. Famously, despite the sheer volume of redactions present within the Epstein Files, they were still poorly redacted. In many instances, photos and emails were released that revealed the identities of the victims, some of the redactions still contained searchable text beneath them, and it became highly plausible that a RegEx query (a conventionalised sequence of characters designed for pattern matching text) was used to automatically redact any instances of the pattern “don* t*,” accounting for both “Donald Trump” and the word “don’t.”
        Rather than the redactions doing the heavy lifting, I suspect the actual cover-up occurred through the disclosure itself. Beyond the DOJ’s redactions, there was no epistemic authority mediating between the files and the public. Three million documents were released all at once, with no structure as to how they ought to be understood, allowing space for a multitude of competing analyses to emerge. As a result, it turned into some kind of true crime Alternate Reality Game, with chronically online types acting as sleuths doing their own research and sharing their discoveries. The gamified approach to navigating the release meant that the files ultimately became prime fodder for even more conspiratorial thinking. It was hard to ascertain what was real and what wasn’t real, not because of the redactions, but because of the excess. There was too much information, and signals were lost in or confused for noise. In their search for the truth, they ironically flooded the zone.[2]


Redaction Toolkit, which opened at Light Works on the 28th of February, was a collaborative exhibition developed during a summer residency at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art by artists Jacob Canet-Gibson, Jordee Stewart, Harrison Waed See, and Stirling Kain. Touched upon in the catalogue essay written by Paul Boyé, in order to develop Redaction Toolkit the artists adopted a kind of exquisite corpse methodology, where each of the artists would conceal from each other what they intended the exhibition outcome to entail. The necessary non-disclosure within this collaborative process is what lends the exhibition its name and, importantly, its central premise. Thinking back to Diehl’s observation about the excitement of redaction, I wonder, then, if the act of redacting or concealing information is what made the works compelling for each of the participating artists.
        Like all exquisite corpse games, the fun happens in the making. It’s exciting to receive a folded page with your previous correspondent’s work redacted bar a few guiding lines or dots from which you extend the illustration. When each of the segments is filled, you unfurl the paper and reveal an absurd figure. It’s unpredictable, ridiculous, maybe delightful. It certainly doesn’t make any sense. Maybe you take a photo of it. Maybe you put it on your fridge, and then you have to explain it to the next person who sees it. They don’t get it. Never mind. It was funny, but I guess you had to have been there.
        So, what is Redaction Toolkit? The way I see it, despite each of the artists having worked on a few pieces together, the exhibition could be viewed as containing two halves in dialogue with each other. We can group Jacob Canet-Gibson’s work and Jordee Stewart’s work into the first half, since both artists are interested in the aesthetics and experience of online data. In the second half, we have Harrison Waed See and Stirling Kain, whose tactile and decidedly analogue practices provide a grass-touching thematic counterpoint. The exhibition contains a lot of work—not exactly three million files, but still more than I can make sense of in one essay, so I’ll focus on the important ones.
        In the Light Works corridor, a familiar location to Dispatch readers by now, Jordee has a triptych sequence of three QR codes placed onto glitch-art prints. These QR codes point to different videos loosely connected by a preoccupation with datacentres. Scanning the one on the right will play a collaged collection of Wayback Machine paraphernalia; a flickering cacophony of late 90s and early 2000s gifs nodding to the dotcom bubble, malware popups, and old Google logos. The QR code in the centre will play a Channel 9 report about how the Next DC data centre in East Perth is actually a very cool and futuristic addition to the city. On the left, it opens a LinkedIn post featuring an interview with Northern Data Group’s Rosanne Kincaid-Smith on the lucrative and insatiable demand for High-Powered Computing. Overall, Jordee’s work presents a dichotomy between video as a readymade and glitch as an aesthetic mode, and neither seem to inform the reading of the other.
        Jordee’s concern with the weight of data, however, helps to contextualise Jacob’s aggressive treatment of images and sculpture. From a first impression, Jacob’s works evoke a car crash: road signs damaged and scattered, paper pulped and splattered, oozing from their Perspex frames. It’s the kind of collision you keep watching to understand how exactly it happened. When you read it through Jordee’s work, you begin to understand it as the detritus of extraction. The damaged street signs, titled CRASHHEAD, strewn across the gallery floor list in their materials “sculpture that functions as conduction speaker,” indicating that their usefulness has been extracted. One could imagine that this is gestured to by their appearance; depleted, abandoned, left to ruin. Data is a central concern for Jacob’s work throughout the show: the code beneath images and videos is revealed and aestheticised. It has an exhibitionist element: this is data, it’s what you’re not supposed to see, this is the ugliness beneath the façade, and now it’s exposed, you can take a look!
        The sense that Jacob’s works feature images and sculptures chewed up and spat out enables a bleak reading for his IRIS Award-winning photograph in the corner. The work features a data-corrupted image of Aaron Bushnell, the former US Airforce serviceman who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. The top half of the image is recognisable, and the bottom half appears as a bright blue. This blue field is a result from Jacob’s data corruption process, wherein he deleted a line of image code for each Palestinian killed in the genocide in Gaza. One wonders, on a symbolic or metaphorical level, what exactly is being erased by this gesture? Is it Aaron’s legacy, or the Palestinians who were killed? The corruption process renders neither visible. It obscures both. Above all else, the work reveals the depravity of quantification. All images, and all deaths, can ultimately be turned into data. Should they be? Appropriately, Jordee’s cartoonish soft sculpture sits opposed to this photograph. A cute pink faceless human underneath a quilted blanket, this figure is overwhelmed, exhausted from the relentless experience of online content, of the horrors.



Harisson’s paintings and Stirling’s tintype photographic prints serve as a counterpoint to the data fixation driving Jordee and Jacob’s works, a second half of the show. Both artists’ works feature nature motifs, and both are decidedly manual. Harrison’s paintings have a naïve, illustrative and idyllic quality, resembling a retreat from online doomerism into some kind of enchanted forest fairytale, or, more cynically, an escape into a fantasy videogame world shut off from a sobering reality. Either way, ignorance is bliss. Stirling’s tintype prints in the main gallery are some of the quietest and most unassuming standouts of the show. They’re delicate and well executed, and they thematically parallel Harrison’s paintings with their meditations on the alchemy and ritual inherent to darkroom photographic processes.
        Nevertheless, despite being such a traditional and auratic mode of photographic development, Stirling’s works suffer from the same burden all photography faces today. The images produced by the tintypes still feel secondary to the process itself. I think this is difficult to escape because the function of the photographic image in the age of digital media is so far removed from that of the tintype. As Jordee and Jacob loudly remind us, photographs are vernacular, informational, and communicative now. At the end of the day, it’s all just data.
        Redaction Toolkit puts forward an experimental collaborative mode towards an exquisite corpse of an exhibition, where each of the artists’ works seem to problematise or undermine the rest. As the title suggests, the exhibition has something to do with a methodology for concealment. What is Redaction Toolkit trying to cover up, and how is it doing so? Perhaps the redaction methodology serves to feign some kind of intrigue or desire. And, perhaps, the real cover up itself is happening in plain sight; a perfect crime[3] obscured by the illusion of redaction. By presenting so much information—so much data—all at once, and with no clear way to make it sensible, it floods the zone.

Jacob Canet-Gibson, Stirling Kain, Harrison Waed See, and Jordee Stewart, Redaction Toolkit, Light Works, 28 February – 7 March 2026.

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Footnotes:

1. Travis Diehl, “The Politics of What’s Left Out,” Spike, January 28, 2026, https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-epstein-files.

2. “Flooding the zone” is a phrase coined by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s political strategist and former editor of Breitbart magazine. The phrase describes Trump’s media strategy of creating an excess of information and spectacle for news media to report on so that some of the specific details in his decisions can slip past unnoticed.

3. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (Verso, 1996).

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Header images: Installation documentation of Redaction Toolkit at Light Works. Artworks by Jacob Canet-Gibson, Stirling Kain, Harrison Waed See, and Jordee Stewart. Photography by Jacob Canet-Gibson.