GALLERY GOING: VISUAL ARTS: REVIEW
Formal beauty in a webcam world

GARY MICHAEL DAULT | Globe and Mail - May 17, 2008

Cheryl Sourkes at Peak Gallery

$550-$5,000. Until May 30, 23 Morrow Avenue., Toronto; 416-53

Cheryl Sourkes has been seeking out, viewing and harvesting webcam images since 2001. As she wrote in a catalogue covering her work from 2001-05, "Images generated by webcams are fleeting, as transitory as numbers on a clock-face. I grab photos out of live streams, reformat them and prepare them for life offstream."

For this latest exhibition of Sourkes's webcam-derived "offstream" photographs called Parking on Personal Webcams, now at Toronto's Peak Gallery, the Toronto-based artist has narrowed and intensified her choice of exhibitable webcam images. Eschewing her normal world-hopping sightings (earlier exhibitions typically included scenes from Paris, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Mexico City and so on), Sourkes seems to have opted here for a rather more concentrated, intimate collection of webcam images which, however far-flung they may have been in geographical origin, all have a similar dank, claustrophobic interiority to them: All of these new webcam-derived photos seem - strangely - to take place in pretty much the same living-room or, more often, bathroom.

Gazing at these images feels initially voyeuristic, though to feel guilty about it would clearly be misguided. For the dramatis personae of Sourkes's new images are not, of course, being secretly observed but, rather, are deliberately broadcasting themselves to the world at large. This is not a matter of surveillance, then, but rather of exhibitionism.

There isn't much point in asking oneself why anyone would plunk themselves before a video camera and offer up live, close-up images of one's genitals (just to prove they exist, maybe?) or, as is the case with a suite of four, time-progressive bathtub images, why a woman would care to lie back in her bath and masturbate for the world (because she can?). Clearly, the human psyche is large and, to misuse poor old Walt Whitman, "contains multitudes."

Webcasting on the Internet, Sourkes notes in her artist's statement, "has shifted the boundary between public and private activities" and "created a new type of social interaction," whereby certain actions take place "without a fourth wall." One wishes, sometimes, that the missing fourth wall could be put back in place. On the other hand, Sourkes's images are inescapably fascinating: There is one photo of a naked woman who looks like a stack of inner tubes (Bath 4), and a guy (Chest with Screen) who sports one nipple as alarmingly red as a radish.

In the end, though, what makes these insistently transactional webcam photo-experiences more or less palatable (as opposed to merely psychologically aberrant and grabby) is their formal beauty. Beauty is a tad suspect these days (though deep in our sensibilities, we all honour it), but Sourkes, who admits to being interested in "aesthetic issues," obviously delights in the degree to which webcam participants often seem deliberately to align themselves with key moments from art history: Sourkes's self-pleasuring bath-woman, for example, is inescapably Bonnard-like, both in composition and in atmosphere. Indeed, it is remarkable how painterly Sourkes's photographs are. Because the webcam image resolution is so low (72 dpi) and because the computer approximates and fills in what it "sees," pale skin, for example, is now as mottled and facetted with greens, purples, golds and roses as it would be if a painter had brushed on the colour with oils.

Art Story
Cheryl Sourkes
Contact Photography Festival

Digital

“I love the quality of what you call old-fashioned photography, but new technology seems to possess an irresistible allure.”

Photos By Cheryl Sourkes

WHO: Cheryl Sourkes

WHERE: Peak Gallery (23 Morrow, 416-537- 9518)

WHEN: April 30 to May 31

WHY: Sourkes, who culls her images entirely from the Internet via screen capture, has been developing a new style of photography that paradoxically gives us a bird’s eye view of people in their most intimate and vulnerable moments. These webcam stills, with their uneasy balance of voyeuristic distance and proximity, capture people preening, eating, masturbating, rushing to work or looking forlorn and bored. Alienation has never been so compelling.

about the exhibition