Photo: Tate Tullier
vo·yeur /voiˈyər/ noun
a person who gains sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity.
Opening Reception: February 12th, 6–8pm
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More than 90 works by 12 national and international artists explore the concept of voyeurism. At times the artist is the voyeur; at others, the voyeur appears within the photograph—but the audience is always the voyeur.
Curated by Ron Amato.
Special Event
Artists Talk
Saturday, February 14th, 2PM
Participating Artists
Randy Addison
John Brant
Rocco Buonpane
Kostis Fokas
Jason Jackson
Jaco Moretti
Manel Ortega
Pacifico Silano
Paul Specht
Tate Tullier
Sam Waxman
Ron Amato
Featured Images
Curator’s Statement
In recent years our society has grown more voyeuristic. This rise can be attributed to the internet, social media, reality television, and ubiquitous technologies like smartphones, which make it easy to watch and be watched. The internet also brought the phenomenon of the celebrity “sex tape.” Sometimes these tapes are released without the participants’ consent; more often, however, one or more participants use them to gain attention and boost their media profile. Our voyeuristic culture consumes them eagerly.
Sites like OnlyFans have monetized the “amateur sex tape” (raising the question: if you’re making money, can you still be called amateur?). Ever wanted to see your friends having sex? Now you can. In the male gay community, watching and being watched is routine for some. Public sex can play an important role in sexual awakening. Communal sex spaces offer affirmation, male bonding, and joy for men who may have spent much of their youth closeted and ashamed.
One of the earliest known nude artworks is the Venus of Willendorf, thought to be over 30,000 years old. Perhaps the most famous nude, Michelangelo’s David (1501–1504), is a monument to male beauty and virility. With the invention of photography in 1839 came the photographic nude. These images were not necessarily sexual—consider Hippolyte Bayard’s self-portrait The Drowning (1840), Eadweard Muybridge’s late-19th-century motion studies, or Thomas Eakins’s photographs made as references for The Swimming Hole (1883). While some argue that nudity inherently evokes eroticism, these works often pursued other motivations.
In the mid- to late 20th century, male nude photography became more common and more widely distributed, despite legal and cultural challenges—Bob Mizer faced repeated investigations for distributing “dirty pictures,” and much of George Platt Lynes’s archive of male nudes was released posthumously. In my formative years as a photographer, I found a treasure trove of images of the male body in art books. I spent countless hours studying Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Francesco Scavullo, and, later, Peter Hujar. Their work granted me and many others permission to explore our sexuality and admiration of men in our own work.
For this exhibition I brought together 11 other lens-based artists with whom I feel a kinship, mostly from afar. The power of social media now lets us find community instead of working in isolation. I have long admired their work. In inviting them, I aimed to represent a diversity of approaches to voyeurism. Although the approaches differ, there is a common through line in all the work: by the very nature of our practice, we are voyeurs, and we invite our audience to be voyeurs as well.
— Ron Amato
Gallery Hours
Thursdays: 4–8 PM
Fridays: 4–8 PM
Saturdays: 2–6 PM
Sundays: 2–6 PM
Exhibition Views
Installation photography by Da Ping Luo
