PEEPSHOW #5 at O’Born Contemporary (710 Yonge), to March 13. 416-413-9555. Rating: NNN
Whether you celebrate vagina Day or Valentine’s Day this weekend (or both), sex and gender are ardently on the brain.
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O’Born Contemporary dives into these themes with Peepshow #5, a group show featuring moody motel scenes by Torontonian Finn O’Hara, sexy if solitary self-portraits by Holland’s Camilla Holmgren, sex-trade sites by Ryerson student Leanne Eisen and a selection of anonymous mid-century nudes.
O’Hara’s and Holmgren’s work is okay, but Eisen’s colour photos are the highlight. For her 2006 series, Play, she reconstructs a brothel, a strip club and other sex trade sites in dollhouse scale, then photographs and enlarges those scenes.
Eisen’s settings range from the lurid, like a sparkly-bedspreaded, mirror-walled room, to the bare bones, like a dingy sunken-mattress, wrung-out-washrag affair. In all cases, Eisen fascinates with sheer meticulousness. Bowls of condoms, rows of fetish footwear, piles of porn mags and side tables of toys, lube and egg timers are all convincingly miniaturized.
The detail’s not just material Eisen also reproduces a long list of “in-house rules.” Some are cryptic, like “Every walk must be verified before customers leave.” Others get grammatically creative, like “When customers are in parlor everyone must parlor.” And others are prison-like – “Visits on Sunday (1hr),” “Phone calls on Sunday (1).”
Overall, the photos give a sense of these places as schizophrenic sites for both far-out fantasy and cold commerce, for potential ecstasy and possible exploitation.
A series of anonymous nudes from the 1960s have a similarly ambiguous, double-edged effect. The shag carpets, beehive hairdos and desk-side cigarette lighters read as dated kitsch, while the naked women stay pinned in a centuries-old enterprise of arousal. Hung alongside Eisen’s images, they make you wonder what rules these women had to adhere to, and for whose economic benefit.
art@nowtoronto.com
