Live free webcams | march 29 - april 28, 2007

Candid cameras

[Webcam subjects are always `on,' driven by a need to share their lives, Webcam subjects are always "on," driven by a need to share their lives] by Peter Goddard

Anyone reacting in shock and disgust to the news of the recent Scarborough apartment murder caught live on a lobby camera connected to the tenants' TV sets was likely to have as a next thought, "Didn't the killer know there'd be a camera present observing everything?"

The very same question comes to mind while looking at Live Free Webcams, Cheryl Sourkes' show at Peak Gallery.
True, all of the figures shown in the veteran Toronto artist's sumptuous digital photographs are entirely innocent of wrongdoing in any sense. Yet all are engaged in some thoroughly revealing activity, whether that means they're masturbating, singing, arguing or merely looking terribly morose.

Each individual evidently wanted to be revealed publicly by the very fact of positioning a webcam in his or her domestic environment.

But this begs the question: Why? Why has everyone in Sourkes' show thrown privacy to the wind in order to broadcast her or his daily life via the Internet?

The artist admits she doesn't have the answer. "Perhaps there's some frisson felt in being seen," she suggests. "We must remember that for every exhibitionist, there's a voyeur, and for every voyeur, there's an exhibitionist.

In this show, the people shown are all driven by something, by food, by sex, by the need to be entertaining and entertained."
The National Gallery – mounting a parallel exhibition, Cheryl Sourkes: Public Camera, a retrospective survey, April 20-Oct. 21, with seven years' worth of the artist's webcam work – has its own concerns about what's entertaining and what's not.
(The material in the Peak show is all from this year.) Indeed, much to the dismay of the artist herself, the Ottawa gallery is housing some of her more explicit images – a few in evidence now at Peak Gallery – in their own little childproof viewing studio.

"I don't like to hive sexuality off from normal life," Sourkes complains. But the gallery isn't budging from its protective position even when the artist notes that another National exhibition, featuring huge sculptural pieces by artist Ron Mueck, "has a lot of oversized penises in it."

In George Orwell's novel 1984, "Big Brother is Watching You" – the slogan posted everywhere throughout the state-controlled city of the future – terrified its victim/hero, Winston Smith (and presumably, the reader).

Orwell's inspirational source for Big Brother's method of fear-mongering went back to The Panopticon, a late 18th-century theory conceived by philosopher Jeremy Bentham on the potential for endless prison-like surveillance.
In Bentham's imagination (and in Orwell's), endless surveillance should ensure docile compliance through the fear of exposure and eventual punishment.

But from the vantage point of the 21st century – where Abu Ghraib-level war crimes are more likely to be filmed than sex acts – surveillance no longer works as a certain scare tactic.
Quite the opposite, it would seem. Surveillance seems wanted and welcomed in many circumstances by a good many individuals.

In Sourkes' show, surveillance seems to be absorbed by those being surveyed as if it were sunshine on their skins.
The pale, skinny guy naked and alone on a couch shown in Homecammer: Woody (2007) is calmly taking time away from attending to his aroused state in order to reach for something – a laptop? a martini? – placed on a nearby table.

Being sexually aroused and naked to the world is not enough for him. He wants to be as comfortably exposed for the community of webcam users he expects will be watching him on the Internet. Why should he sweat it? Surveillance systems have so thoroughly saturated society they're now an accepted presence in our lives, rather like the weather.

But Sourkes believes surveillance's current level of acceptance is a generational matter more than anything else. "In fact, I'm documenting a paradigm shift in attitudes to what's happening," she says.

"I'm on the shady side of being 60. I was around when television first came into Canada. I perceived the difference in our culture before and after it arrived, how there was a different existence after it came. For instance, there was more streetlife before. It's somewhat the same now."

Jenni Ringley, one of the first webcam stars on the Internet revealing her day-to-day existence, "eventually turned her camera off," Sourkes notes. "But then she turned it on again. Why? She said she felt lonesome without it. There's a different sense of self and a different sense of privacy now. I don't yet have the answer for it. That's why I'm taking these pictures. That's what drives me."

A certain theatrical sense pervades Sourkes' images, no doubt due to her subjects' ongoing awareness of always being caught out. The naked woman isn't merely lounging against the side of her bed in Homecammer: Nude (2007). She's lounging on the bed theatrically.

Of course, the artist hasn't used any of the boring stuff on the nearly endless stream of images she watched. Still, you can be sure webcam folks are always "on" as long as they know the camera is on.

Sex is a prime mover in the webcam world, for sure. But in Sourkes' show, even raw sexuality is treated elegantly in a painterly fashion that's applied to all the right photographic surfaces.

Cheryl Sourkes: Live Free Webcams is at Peak Gallery, 23 Morrow Ave., to April 28.

According to artist Cheryl Sourkes, the world divides pretty cleanly into exhibitionists and voyeurs. "I am, of course, a voyeur," she tells me during a recent telephone conversation. Me too. What else would an art critic be? Sourkes's exhibition, Live Free Webcams, is the latest manifestation of the work the artist has been conducting for the past seven years, surfing the world via webcam technology and downloading and printing what she finds. She finds extraordinary things.

For this current exhibition, Sourkes has had electronic recourse to a particular "homecam community with participants from all over the world." These peculiarly exhibitionist people set up their webcams and act out their lives in front of them - for anyone to glom onto and watch. Sometimes the results are sort of calm and lovely - a wistful woman merely crosses the room before the camera; a female nude lies quietly and daintily against her sofa. Sometimes things are a tad more raucous - as in one of Sourkes's more Rabelaisian printouts, showing a naked and purposeful man trying unsuccessfully to have his way with an inflated female doll, which hovers over him like a flesh-coloured dirigible.

Well, it's the human condition, I guess, written large and wide. Sourkes's prints are beautiful, too, in a painterly way. The low focus of the webcam image makes for prints that are sumptuous when enlarged. Closes today, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto

about the exhibition