Robin Rhode staged his earliest work on the streets of his native South Africa where he interacted with graffiti-like images chalked on exterior walls, and documented these performances photographically. He eventually came to photograph others in similar scenarios, at times including props as seen here. For Rhode, photography is a means to create a composite of the human figure, narrative action, and images that have been executed in other media. The title of this work is a play on the word panopticon, a system of surveillance that monitors people from a single, controlling vantage point. By fracturing the word to extract Pan, the name of a subversive trickster figure from Greek mythology, Rhode turns the idea of a single all-seeing authority on its head. His images suggest that we might be able to inscribe our own visions on a seemingly impenetrable form. In so doing, he creates a visual metaphor equally applicable to activating people in their encounters with art or challenging a politically oppressive entity such as the South African Apartheid government, under which the artist, who is now based in Berlin, was raised. (K Hileman, Seeing Now, 20 Feb - 15 May 2011)