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Art & Books

The Brothel Without Walls

THE BROTHEL WITHOUT WALLS at University of Toronto Art Centre (15 Kings College) to May 29. Rating: NNNN


Nine artists, including the ubiquitous Douglas Coupland, examine the eerie and alienated spaces in which television, film and online media are created. As our modern culture of spectacle metastasizes into a maze of reflected and refracted images, the artists reframe McLuhan’s prescient claim that the photograph is a “brothel without walls.”

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Stefan Ruiz’s prints of a lavish Spanish soap opera set explore the boundary between fantasy and the vast technical apparatus that supports it, as a villa gives way to scaffolding, lighting and cameras. Evan Baden shows young women working in their homes in front of webcams and revels in the disconcerting contradictions between their on-screen personas and off-screen lives.

Susan Anderson’s glossy child beauty queens hail from some disturbing Disneyland where the sexualizing forces of pageant culture collide head on with our expectations of young girlhood.

Each photo in the show is freighted with the paradoxes inherent in the traffic of images, and none of them suggests a way out.

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