February 24, 2005 - March 19, 2005

Cheryl Sourkes | Public Camera | review

> opening Saturday, February 26, 2005 | 2 - 6pm

Cheryl Sourkes: Widok, 2004, C-print

Interior: Council Chamber, Whitehorse, Yukon,
2005, Lightjet print, 4’ x 5’

Interior: Wedding Registry, U.K. 2005,
Lightjet print, 4’ x 5

Interior: Moda Burgo Fashion Design School,
Milan, Italy, 2005, Lightjet print, 4’ x 5’

Interior: Chonnam State University, Korea,
2005, Lightjet print, 4’ x 5’

Interior: Moda Burgo Fashion Design School, Milan, Italy,
2005, Lightjet print, 4’ x 5’

Live from Peak Gallery,
2005, live-feed camera

Interference: 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, New York,
2005, Lambda print, 8” x 10”

Interference: Mount St. Louis, Ontario, Canada,
2005, Lambda print, 8” x 10”

Public Camera
Public Camera is an exhibition of images derived from live-feed, web cameras. Normally, webcam images are utterly fleeting - transitory as numbers on a clock-face. In Public Camera Cheryl Sourkes grabs these images out of the moving stream of time, then outputs them as photographic stills. In this way they acquire a material presence off-screen that was never anticipated.

There are three bodies of work in Public Camera.

- Interiors are 4’ x 5’, framed photographs depicting chairs, tables and people who appear unaware of any special scrutiny.

- Interference portrays anomalies resulting from unanticipated physical conditions. Rain or snow on camera housing show up in some of these images, a reflection adds an unanticipated interior layer to others, etc. To evoke the appearance of a laptop computer screen, Interference is printed 8” x 10”, face-mounted to Plexi, backed with blue Sintra and hung with gravity bars.

- The third piece, Live from the Wedding Chapel Cam in Las Vegas displays animated, wedding sequences, many conducted by Elvis impersonators, but featuring traditional and casual wedding styles as well. Live from the Wedding Chapel Cam in Las Vegas is presented on two, 5” x 7” screens.

Once webcam stills have been worked in these various ways, their nature changes. They move beyond the distanced instrumentality implicit in their origins and turn into indeterminate hybrids, more substantial and at the same time more ambivalent than at their source.

Cheryl Sourkes is a Canadian artist. She has been based in Toronto since 1993. Before that time she lived and worked in the art communities of Vancouver and Montreal. Shortly after coming to Toronto her photographic practice morphed into a computer-based one. For the last five years she has used webcam-generated source material for her photographic stills and animated sequences. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Canada, as well as internationally in the United States, France, Italy, Great Britain, Germany and Belgium. Her production is found in the Air Canada Collection, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Concordia Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, amongst others. She has been the recipient of many awards from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Council for the Arts. She has contributed to or had her work featured in many publications including Geist, ANGELAKI, Capital Culture, new formations, TESSERA, Public, Blackflash and The Zone of Conventional Practice & Other Real Stories. Cheryl Sourkes has also curated extensively, most recently the work of Katherine Knight at the Art Gallery of Ottawa and the group show Shadow of the Machine at Museum London.