Cheryl Sourkes

Featured Webcam

9.12.2006 – 28.1.2007

Opening event Saturday 9th December 15.00 – 18.00

 

twenty+3 projects is pleased to present for its first exhibition, Featured Webcam, recent work by well known Canadian artist Cheryl Sourkes.

For nearly ten years Sourkes has explored material from Internet webcams. She captures their fleeting images and gives them an unexpected life off the screen. More recently she has paid particular attention to the cams of a specific webcam community with thousands of participants.  Home Cams & Private Life, the two bodies of work in this exhibition, take images from this community as their source.

Featured Webcam is an exhibition full of information about the world. But as Sourkes says, “it is a world that is neither the real world nor the virtual one, but a space that participates in both.“  Like a documentary photographer, Sourkes tracks this world. Her camera is other peoples web cams, her film the computer screen. The results are of ordinary life, specific, global, distant, alienated, full of great intimacies.

Private Life is a series of movies from a flow of sequenced stills. It presents the ordinary lives: hanging out in kitchens, backyards, bedrooms, restaurants, bars, etc., of people from all around the globe. Often the country of origin is unknown. At times intimate, sometimes alienated, Private Life introduces us to images of people and places gathered from situations that can seem both extremely familiar yet anonymous.

Home Cams is a red leather bound book, each page a series of six images arranged as they would be seen on the screen. They show the variety of ways in which people from this webcam community disseminate information to the web: the view through a curtain, their children, their bodies, sex, penises, dogs, cars. The book's images reflects an everyday that occupies a public cultural space outside of mainstream political or commercial interests.

Cheryl Sourkes has exhibited widely across Canada, in Britain, France and the US. Her work is in numerous public and private collections. Private Lives and Home Cams have been shown at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Tom Thomson Gallery in 2006 and will be a part of an upcoming solo exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in 2007.  Sourkes lives in Toronto and is represented by Peak Gallery, Toronto.

 

   
more images