"No. 5 - Peepshow"
2009-02-04 until 2009-03-13
O'Born Contemporary
Toronto, ON, CA Canada

O’Born Contemporary is heating up these cold winter months with No. 5 - Peepshow. Open from February 4th, 2009 until March 13th, 2009, this new exhibition draws on the voyeuristic history of the peepshow, and is our Valentine’s Day gift to our clients and friends. It gives a nod and a wink to the Yonge Street location of the gallery, which was previously a sex shop. Work from artists Finn O’Hara, Leanne Eisen, Camilla Holmgren, and a selection of mid‐ century vernacular nudes by several anonymous photographers make up the show.

Toronto‐based photographer, Finn O’Hara, was given exclusive access to the now demolished Hillcrest Motel for its final hours in 2007. Toronto’s Lakeshore motel strip was renowned for illicit encounters and covert activities, and the Hillcrest was one of the most notorious motels along the strip. It was also the last one left standing. O’Hara’s images give us an intimate glance into the events that might have occurred there. Shot on film, on a bitterly cold winter night, the building and its rooms are the very heart of the motel experience and lend themselves seamlessly to O’Hara’s film noir fantasies.

Emerging local talent, Leanne Eisen, also makes reference to seedy interiors. She has chosen legalized Las Vegas sex hotels as the influence for the interiors that take centre stage in her dollhouse photographs. Eisen has skillfully constructed scaled down props and interiors by hand. Not knowing if these are photographs of actual spaces in a brothel, give the armchair voyeur the opportunity to ponder at length what may have taken place in these vacated spaces.

Camilla Holmgren is an O’Born Contemporary favourite. Her self‐portraits continue to fascinate and entice the imagination. We follow her every move as she stalks herself through the rooms of a sparsely furnished European apartment. Holmgren’s partially clad presence continues to invite the viewer to contemplate her as she partakes in a solo game of hide and seek. The images are captured by her own hand, at her own whim, through her use of a cable release.

The vernacular photographs are available from a private collection of so‐called “cheesecake” photos from the 1950s and 1960s. They take us back to an era in which actions were furtive on the part of the photographer and model, as well as the end purchaser. The models in these vintage images often don’t meet contemporary ideals of beauty, and perhaps that is one reason why these photographs retain a certain charm. Images in the collection range from large‐scale modern prints produced from vintage negatives to small and intimate original prints. They remind the contemporary collector that these photographs, while never intended to be high art in their time, are still a strong presence in the history of the nude. They bear with them the passage of time and the crumpled edges of the history of human desire.

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