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APRIL 30 - May 31, 2008

Cheryl Sourkes  | PARKING ON PERSONAL WEBCAMES |review

> opening Saturday, May 03 | 4-8pm
   Artist in Attendance

- Toronto Photography Festival May1-31

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10


Wecasting on the Internet has shifted the boundary between public and private activities. It's created a new type of social interaction. Ordinary things like bathing and hanging out are recast without a fourth wall. Anyone with a webcam can be an actor, a producer, an activist, an exhibitionist, a pornographer, whatever. PARKING ON PERSONAL WEBCAMS presents photographs and time-based work that foregrounds once private behaviour within the public sphere of the World Wide Web.

Webcams record in the real world. Normally their images appear in the virtual one. However I transform these images into photographs and time-based work. I’m interested in what arises when images cross over between realms. I’m also interested in aesthetic issues. I’ve noticed people often frame their cams to produce pictures that look like pictures whose formal characteristics they may have absorbed from popular culture or from art history.

People tend to focus personal webcams on ordinary places – the living room, bedroom, computer workstation, etcetera. As webcams are ubiquitous and record continuously, people don't tend to perform for them they way they do for other cameras. Instead, their behaviour resides in some semi-conscious space between ordinary life and performance. I wonder what this says about our era.
 
Cheryl Sourkes