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Description
Flaneur of the cybersphere, botanist on the information highway. Cheryl Sourkes has spent a lot of time over the past few years lingering among the digital citizenry, observing and taking pictures of the online crowd. More precisely, the artist takes pictures of other people's pictures-the visual field of the Internet is always already framed. Over time, Sourkes has sampled a wide range of cyberimagery--taken from street and nest cams, commercial, institutional and private camera sites and video chat rooms--more recently grabbing screenshots from text exchanges over instant messaging-services. In all, Sourkes' project takes measure of the types and qualities of social behaviour exhibited by the populace of virtual postmodernity. Insofar as this behaviour is endlessly varied and usually unscripted (although still highly codified), Sourkes endeavours to classify the actions and phenomena observed online in poetic and provisional ways. Downloaded and enlarged to wall size, the artist's digital snapshots are transformed into stunning and painterly historical tableaux; when reanimated in video and bookworks, the pictures sketch affecting, if transitory, narratives about private life turned public in the Internet age.
In many ways, Sourkes' practice is akin to that of the classic modernist figure of the flaneur-as-street-photographer. Like Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Frank and Arbus before her, she remains alert for the "decisive moment" watchful for the telling gestures and suggestive juxtapositions that compose the everyday dramas of digital life. Capturing people's performances at work, at home, at play, studying, chatting online and off and, of course, engaging in the myriad forms of sexual exhibitionism now synonymous with life on the Internet, her pictures show us subjects lost in thought, caught up in the moment, living lives large and small, under the ever-present gaze of modern panoptical technology.
Like many of the subjects that populate Sourkes' "cam works" the subject of Homecammer: Guy (2006) seems curiously unaware of the camera in front of him. Pensive, bathed in electronic luminosity, he emerges from black, empty space, head in hand, eyes cast towards the light that emanates from the screen below. Thinker, statesman, an everyman of the digital age, he can't be completely unaware... |
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