Rear Window Treatment

Louis B. James is pleased to present Rear Window Treatment, a group exhibition featuring the work of Deric Carner, Barb Choit, William E. Jones, Michael Mahalchick, Brad Phillips, and Betty Tompkins. The show circles around themes of voyeurism, privacy, sexual exploitation and display, alighting on the intimate moments of others and the uneasy interstices between arousal and violation.

Barb Choit takes photographs of her neighbors in a housing complex in Vancouver. The photographs are at once banal and unsettling, catching strangers in unguarded and un-posed situations of daily life.

The watercolor paintings of Brad Phillips have a more explicit relationship to the voyeuristic gaze. Phillips takes snapshots with an IPod on the street of women’s bodies and painstakingly renders them in watercolor, perverting the benignity of the medium with an obsessive attention to detail and craft.

Betty Tompkins is known for her pristine and highly finished paintings of hardcore pornography in extreme close-up. In Rear Window Treatment Tompkins presents a suite of photo-based drawings, intimate scribbles on source images for her large-scale paintings. The works on paper provide a voyeur’s glimpse into the artist’s process as well as referencing the eye behind the camera, filming and framing the sex act in the real.

Michael Mahalchick creates installation, sculpture, and performance out of the dark cultural detritus he has amassed. For this show he has contributed a simple sculptural book of found porno DVD covers that implicate the viewer in the system of sexual exploitation and performance.

William E. Jones creates politically and erotically charged video from archival filmic imagery. Mansfield, 1962, on display, takes as its source a digitized version of a police produced film entitled Camera Surveillance, instructing other law enforcement agencies on clandestinely catching, through a two-way mirror, men having sex in a public bathroom, originally filmed in Ohio in 1962. The work is a re-edited display of degraded sex and a harbinger of the double edge of illicit looking, exposing to condemn.

Deric Carner uses manipulated imagery and installation elements to explore the ambiguities and continued charge of the image in the digital era. Carner contributes a new interactive sculpture comprised of whittled wood and digital screens live-streaming windows from chaturbate.com, a site in which individuals expose themselves via webcam for monetary “tips,” performing for unseen viewers who hold the authority to direct the scene.