| Cheryl Sourkes | Manchester
Artist Heidi Schaefer's new gallery, Twenty+3 Projects, might
be located in the converted front room of a backstreet terraced
house in Manchester, but its exhibition programme promises to
be far from provincial in ambition. Cheryl Sourkes' Featured Webcam,
the inaugural show, fits in perfectly with the gallery's semidomestic
ambiance. Sourkes is fascinated by the world of the internet webcam,
a world, as she states, that is "neither the real world nor
the virtual one, but a space that participates in both",
very much, you might say, like the art world itself, of course.
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In the two pieces on show here, Private Life and Home Cams, Sourkes
sequences her "indeterminate hybrid" images, taken from
a worldwide webcam community. Sourkes' global image bank shifts
through a life-in-general vocabulary of intimate revelations,
voyeuristic prurience, moments of quite touching intimacy and
passages of brainnumbing tedium.
RC · Twenty+3 Projects, to Jan 28
Published in a-n Reviews Unedited
Tea and Home Movies
by Christine Stoddard
When I was a young girl I had a fascination with looking in other
people’s windows. When walking or driving the streets of
my suburban neighbourhood, I would surreptitiously gawk at the
living rooms I could see through open curtains. A kind of adolescent
voyeurism, these windows became little movie theatres in which
I staged the banalities of daily living and imagined the dramas
that, at the time, seemed the limit points of my future life.
What was that man eating for dinner? What television program were
those kids watching? What was that woman thinking sitting quietly
on the couch? Did any of them know I was watching? What did they
want me to see? What role would I play if they invited me in?
That perverse pleasure of a glimpse into the private world of
another is, ostensibly, the topic of Cheryl Sourkes’ recent
exhibition Featured Webcam at the twenty+3 projects gallery in
Manchester. Borrowing digital imagery from an anonymous community
of internet webcams, Sourkes exhibition raises provocative questions
about practices of surveillance, the performativity of domestic
space, and the curious economies of public/private interaction.
Featured Webcam is composed of two works: Home Cams, a large format
book of digital thumbnail images arranged like a computer screen’s
hyperlinks to various webcams in the community, and Private Life,
a thirty minute DVD of footage compiled from various individual
webcasts. The gallery itself, located in a quiet residential neighbourhood,
is the converted front room of artist-curator, Heidi Schaefer.
The site adds another layer of complexity: instead of peeking
in Schaefer’s front window—through which I can see
a book laid out and a tiny television screen mounted on the wall—I
am invited in and welcomed as a guest. Heidi shows me around the
exhibit, chatting about the work, and offering me a cup of tea.
My voyeuristic pleasure, and the anonymous critical distance usually
given the traditional gallery-goer, is undermined as I become
implicated in the intimacy of her gallery/home and the private
lives on display.
The book, Home Cams, is a coffee table-sized work containing hundreds
of enlarged thumbnail images, six lined up in a row across each
page. Arranged in series of loose similarity, either in terms
of content—particularly the splayed genitals of men and
women, as it is on much of the web—or similar formal and
elements like colour or composition, each page is like a large
white computer screen where text indicates links to “Previous...1
2 3 4 5...Next.” It reads like a consumer catalogue of desires
and aesthetics whose purchase is interrupted by the materiality
of the book itself. The blurry and pixilated quality of much digital
webcam imaging lends the pictures a certain tactility and luminescence.
Like a kind of skin, the pages themselves call to be touched,
caressed, regardless of whether they are an image of a man’s
crotch, a rumpled bed full of children’s toys, or the reach
of an arm to the edge of the frame. It is a desire that Sourkes
exploits to the point of abstraction in some pages of the book
where a thumbnail is enlarged to fit the whole page. Here, the
picture is rendered almost painterly: canvases pulsing with black
snow and squares of white and blue light, red angles and landscapes
of movement of shape, line and colour. In this sense, Home Cams
is a both a body and an aesthetic artifact. One whose erotic exchange
is potentially polluting...which may explain the puzzling presence
of a pair of latex gloves placed casually to the side of the book.
Private Life is perhaps the more interesting of the two pieces
in that it enacts the complex interaction between being and performing,
between private and public space, and the curious oscillation
between display and surveillance that webcam technology activates.
The DVD is a silent video loop of excerpts from thirteen different
webcams that build into a life narrative of quotidian existence:
beginning with the waving branches of an empty garden, the video
moves through images of young to old, sleeping eating, dancing,
bowling, ending with an old woman sitting in an armchair. Sourkes,
in her artist statement, claims, “One can see many things
in the mirror webcams hold up to the world, but everything that
appears is in a unique dimension—neither the real world
nor the virtual one, but a space in which both participate.”
The work formally enacts that gap. A collection of thirteen lives
from across the globe, the narrative never congeals into one life
cycle; structured as sequenced stills captured from multiple webcams,
movement is evoked but never completely fluid; perspective shifts
from landscape, to medium shot, to conversational portrait, to
view out a window, never resolving into one contained viewpoint
and even occasionally reversing the inside/outside view expected
of a private camera. And, most importantly, the players various
ways of engaging (or not engaging) the camera creates an curious
disjuncture between voyeuristic pleasure and intimate participation.
These multiple levels of performativity in Private Life call attention
to the gallery viewer’s gaze (via the webcam itself) as
not merely a controlling, surveilling gaze, but one which is actively
determined through the image’s own practice of image-making.
The persons depicted in Private Life, whether explicitly or implicitly,
perform for the camera and address a (known) viewer. Their webcasts
are made for a community of viewers, friends, family, and acquaintances,
but have now been recontextualized by Sourkes. And it is the awkwardness
of not necessarily being the (intended) viewer that points to
the way public modes of being invade even our most private spaces.
Even in those excerpts where the individual seems to perform the
most private act—masturbation—privacy fails to accrue...quite
literally in this case where the man’s penis remains flaccid
despite his attentions (and ours). The hand and penis remain framed
by public modes of viewing: the camera, the web, the home movie,
the gallery... the host who interrupts the potential privacy of
aesthetic pleasure to ask if I would like more tea. It is this
public intimacy that is the most successful part of Sourkes Featured
Webcam. It is the (dis)comforting potential of inviting the stranger
inside your home and of being invited in.
Christine Stoddard is a PhD candidate at the School of Arts, Histories
and Cultures, University of Manchester.
twenty+3 projects
12 Dec 2006 — 28 Jan 2007
23 Bury AveManchester
Christine Stoddard
© 2007 Christine
Stoddard, artists and photographers. All rights reserved
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