Download
September 23 to October 30, 2004
Daniel Ehrenworth, Whitney Lee, Barbara Pollack
Opening Reception, Thurs, September 23, 6 to 9 pm
Panel Discussion Saturday, September 25th, 3 pm

Essay by Kathleen Pirrie Adams

[T]he computer is the universal solvent into which all difference of media dissolves into a pulsing stream of bits and bytes.

"Unfinished Business," Peter Lunenfeld 1

Whitney Lee, Cyber Girls of the Week, 2003

There is no vacation in the world of internet porn. Each week must be greeted by a new beauty; each frame routinely re-filled. Patron saints of the erotic, the featured models remain a remote but perpetual presence. They come to earth as icons and on occasion touch individual lives in mysterious and unpredictable ways.

With the fifty-two images of the Cyber Girls of the Week series, artist Whitney Lee captures fragments from the steady flow of internet porn. By cropping the original images she restricts the gaze of the viewer to the models' faces. While the technique could be seen to make the girls more sociable—more amenable to the everydayness of regular face-to-face communication—it could also be understood as part of an effort to uncover the personal within these highly publicized photos. Insistently entertaining the tension between the public and private which animates the exhibition as a whole, Lee pushes her dramatization of the question even further in her choice of materials.

Blurring the distinction between art and craft, Lee uses the latch-hook rug (made up of hand-tied strands of coloured yarn woven through a porous support grid) as the means for continuing an ongoing feminist dialogue about the role of women as makers and models in the representational history of the West. While the hooked rug has the immediate effect of valorizing traditional domestic labour, it also bears an interesting relationship to both the labour of the sex workers and the medium of the digital image. By suggesting a connection between domestic and sex work, Lee subtly undermines the moral division of types of women. At the same time, the correspondence between the bits of yarn and the pixels of the digital image make the transition from one medium to the next seem almost logical.

In another work entitled Soft Porn Lee supersizes an internet pinup making it into a full scale area rug. Hung on the wall, with its decorative aspect emphasized, the image of the model becomes spectacular and seems rare, like an exotic souvenir or a trophy from a big game safari. Nearby an image of the rug being vacuumed as it lies in the middle of the floor inverts this implication, demonstrating its ordinariness and insignificance as just one of the millions of commodities that today keep us company.

A similar interest in the inversion of values associated with specific forms of representation also plays a role in Daniel Ehrenworth's Cams project. Using a variety of web cams as source material, the artist selects and renders static portions of a once "live" stream of media: a tired man, naked on a chair in his kitchen; a young girl in shorts curled up on a checkered bedspread; a wild haired lady with roses; two insolent young men pants down, middle fingers up.

Daniel Ehrenworth, Untitled, from the Cams series, 2002

The question of the quality of the life lived in public view accompanies the implementation and acceptance of each new mass medium. With the invention of photography (and especially the snapshot) came a new understanding of what constituted privacy as well as a new sense of what was publicly acceptable. Since the creation of the internet those away-from-the-camera places, unheard of and unrecorded, become less and less likely to be identified with domesticity and the home. In fact, with the internet's proliferation of access points to the public realm, the home increasingly becomes the site of image, text, and music production.

As each new layer of representation adds its density to the mediascape, their respective strategies and tactics begin to meld and overlap: dramatic tableau exploits photojournalism, food fashion absorbs pornography, and scientific inspection seems to inform all our viewing habits these days. With the internet now the main point of access to the public from within the private realm, the flow becomes bi-directional. As it does, it threatens some familiar distinctions upon which we base our understanding of what constitutes banality, intimacy, or the location of the self.

Daniel Ehrenworth, Untitled, from the Cams series, 2002

Through the act of removing the images from their on-line homes—where they are animated and contained by the browser interface—Ehrenworth restores a kind of vulnerability to the subjects that enhances their dignity. Even the more stagy or provocative pictures, once translated to hard copy prints and dislodged from their real time sequence, gain something in terms of emotional impact. It seems that, perversely enough, the less information we have about the subjects, the greater our capacity for empathy. Not knowing why we are being shown an apparently hand-made valentine allows it a poignancy that context or explanation would likely kill.

If the user objective of a game like Quake (www.planetquake.com) is to "stay alive and get out of the place you're in", then the invitation to life in the military inverts this sequence: making escape from 'home' the first priority. In 1999 the U.S. Army's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis developed an on-line game that would allow youngsters to play soldier in state-sponsored virtual missions. A typical first person shooter game, America's Army offers players a pseudo-familiar relationship with one of the United States' biggest institutions.

Barbara Pollack, America's Army, Video Still, 2003

In response to the presence of the military in her home, artist Barbara Pollack filmed her son Max's face as he plays the game, then edited it together with footage of the game play—the two tracks arranged in horizontal strips, one stacked atop the other. A regular looking soft-faced kid with a hint of lip hair, Max plays America's Army without much apparent expression. His eyes dart across the screen; his mouth tenses and relaxes slightly, occasionally smiling sheepishly, as he immerses himself in anti-terrorist efforts. The piece confounds our expectation that the desensitizing effects of battle will be immediately visible on the boy's face. Watching the video reminds us that we don't really know how to interpret facial clues and leaves us uncertain as to what kind of proof of damage we are seeking. What does become apparent however is that the computer game has the power to detach the boy from his body. As a portal to the world outside the home, the internet not only delivers data but also takes it away.

In bringing the work of these three artists together, Download becomes the point of convergence for a series of artistic experiments that take into consideration the effects of the widespread embrace of internet technologies and the changes in visual representation conditioned by the move to the digital. They engage in the popular preoccupation with what constitutes authorship and ownership by implicating themselves in both legal and ethical discourses about appropriation. At the same time, these artists participate in the creation of a new form of witnessing which is less informed by the notion of the witness as moral autheticator and increasingly influenced by the interplay of surveillance and display.

The uneven rates of data upload and download—and the preservation of the commercial producer's advantage within the digital domain—is not explicitly referenced by the works in this exhibition. Nevertheless, the use of internet sources and their manipulation by artists working with analog materials and methods offers an understated critique of its overproduction of images and its capacity to colonize. In the process of grappling with the effects of the internet on contemporary culture, Download indicates how much digital debris already exists within our off-line world and acts as a harbinger of what we will face as computing increasingly becomes ubiquitous.

1 The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, edited by Peter Lunenfeld. MIT Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999), 7.

Biographies

Daniel Ehrenworth (BFA 2003, Ryerson University) is an artist, emerging curator, and arts coordinator. Daniel has upcoming solo shows at The Khyber Centre of Visual Arts in Halifax and at The Burston Gallery in Toronto as well as upcoming two-person exhibitions at The New Gallery in Calgary and The Carnegie Gallery in Dundas. Since 2002, Daniel has co-organized Ryerson University’s Kodak Lecture Series. In 2003 he curated Close, an emerging artist show at Pikto Gallery. His photographic work has been published in Maisonneuve, Applied Arts, Mirror Magazine, and Hive Magazine and is collected in Canada and the U.S. He is a recipient of a du Maurier Arts Council emerging artist grant in 2003 and a Toronto Jewish Arts Council visual arts production grant in 2004. Born in Ottawa, he lives and works in Toronto.
www.danielehrenworth.com

Whitney Lee is a young artist who is rapidly gaining notoriety. Her artwork has been reviewed in Columbus newspapers The Other Paper and Columbus Alive, and in Philadelphia newspapers City Paper and Philadelphia Weekly. Whitney’s work has been published nationally in BUST magazine, and is featured in the Summer 2004 issue of Venus Zine. She has also won some major awards, such as Best in Show at the 7th International Juried Exhibition at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL. Whitney is also a hip, loving mother. She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and five-year-old son, Peyton.
www.whitneylee.com

Barbara Pollack, based in New York City, works in photography and video, often in collaboration with her son, Max Berger. The Max Files, a survey of her work since 2000, was presented at the University of Connecticut. She has had solo shows at the Holly Solomon Gallery (1997,1999) and Esso Gallery (2001), Trans>area (2003) and her museum-scale installation, The Family of Men, was presented at Thread Waxing Space (1999). Her more recent videos were shown in PG-13, a two-person show at Diverseworks in Houston in March 2004 and have been featured in group shows at the Aldrich Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum’s Independent Studies Program, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center. Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Brooklyn Museum and the New York Public Library. Additionally, Pollack writes extensively on contemporary art and teaches the history of photography at the School of Visual Arts.

Kathleen Pirrie Adams is a writer and curator who teaches in Ryerson University's New Media program. As the Program Director of InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre (from 1997-2004) she curated numerous exhibitions presenting work by artists such as Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, Istvan Kantor, Willy le Maitre and Eric Rosensweig, Steve Mann, Haruki Nishijima, David Rokeby, Debra Solomon, and Elizabeth vander Zaag. Kathleen served as the Commissioner for InterAccess and Alphabet City's collaborative production of Canada's official presentation at the Venice Architecture Biennale: Next Memory City in 2002. As part of Field Office, she works with Amanda Ramos (and a changing team of collaborators) to develop exhibition strategies for multi-site installation exhibitions and commissioned projects.