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Artist watches the world go
By GARY MICHAEL DAULT
Surveillance is always with us. We are a nation of inveterate and sometimes
insidious watchers, observing one another with a fierce dedication born
of the fear that we may somehow have missed something of the most pressing
importance. The whole world is beginning to look like reality TV.
Cheryl Sourkes is a watcher too, but because she is an artist, her watching
is of quite a different sort. The results of her assiduous surveying
of the world of surveillance can be enjoyed in her exhibition Public
Camera, opening tomorrow at Toronto's Peak Gallery.
I spent some time in Sourkes's studio a few days ago, to try to see
the world her way. It was a revelation. "Where would you like to
go?" Sourkes asks me, as we bring our mugs of ginger tea over to
the table holding the big flat monitor that dominates the room. "I
don't know," I admit, feeling condemned to freedom. "Where
do you think we should start?"
"Well," Sourkes tells me, punching up a steady succession
of wildly varying images, "we can go to Times Square in New York
[and suddenly there we are], or to a school for fashion design in Milan
[and now we're there too], or to Paris [ditto], or we can just sit here
and watch Toronto go by." Which is actually what we do, thanks
to her now having connected us to a live video camera installed on the
balcony outside the Panorama Room on the 52nd floor of
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the Manulife
Centre. We drink our tea and gaze meditatively upon a soft dove-grey
image of the CN Tower for a while. A few seagulls fly by, not knowing
they are being observed.
Normally, as Sourkes explains in her gallery statement, webcam images
-- the pictures generated by the live-feed cameras that are installed
all over the world and are continually feeding the fruits of their unblinking
stares into the Internet -- are "utterly fleeting, transitory as
numbers on a clock face." What Sourkes does is to sample images
"from the moving stream of time" and then "output them"
as still photos. (She has her computer configured as a camera. "One
of my keys is a shutter," she tells me.)
When you get right down to it, I suppose you could argue that artists
have always done that. Take Picasso "freezing" the action
of the bullfight, for example, by drawing it (some of it) with a brush
on a ceramic platter. It is oddly thrilling, though, in looking at Sourkes's
work, to witness the closing of the gap between the mindless, numbing
flux of the non-stop webcammed world, and the artist's reassertion of
her visual individuality in the exercising of her choice of image to
stop and claim and print and enlarge and study. Stopping time makes
you feel immortal -- for a few moments anyhow.
Sourkes appears to know everything you can know about the cultural disposition
of webcammery. She knows which countries have the most webcams in operation.
She clocks how they update their images at different speeds (each webcam
sojourn is really a succession of stills). And she knows something about
national taste in webcamming ("Paris is very self-aware -- they
put their best treasures up -- while London is more bloody-minded, concerning
itself mostly with traffic and terrorists").
She divides the images she harvests into categories: Earth and Moon,
Animal Cams (in Japan, she tells me, people webcam their cats, so as
to keep tabs on them), Interiors (with a subcategory for airports),
Convenience Cams ("consensual webcam portraits," wherein she
asks a friend or colleague in a distant place to "meet her"
in front of a certain camera -- in Times Square, for example -- to be
scanned and printed) and Interferences (where unexpected reflections
or weather conditions create anomalies in the image -- which often turn
out to be as beautiful as they are unpredictable). My favourite of her
categories is Ship Cams. This morning, for example, we watch the slow
progress of a Norwegian cruise ship called Norwegian Wind from a webcam
affixed to its prow, as it plies the dark turquoise waters under an
emerald moon.
One of her wickedest, funniest, most touching webcam preoccupations
is with the live Wedding Chapel Cam in Las Vegas. Sourkes dutifully
records these strange, ingenuous ceremonies, often conducted by Elvis
impersonators, and "animates" the resulting succession of
stills. ("Occasionally it's the bride who waves [at the webcam],
but more often it's the groom," she says.) Sourkes takes a sip
of her tea and grins. "The biggest putdown for a photographer is
to be known as a wedding photographer, but," she says gaily, "I
am a wedding photographer!" And proud of it.
Cheryl Sourkes's Public Camera opens tomorrow at the Peak Gallery and
runs to March 19. 23 Morrow Ave., 416-537-8108.
about the exhibition |
