‘Sexting’

How far away can we get from ourselves? Unless there is a selfie-stick immediately on hand, taking pictures of our bodies with a mobile device is tricky as the reach is limited to an arm’s length. The results are something strange, provocative, perhaps, but devoid of intimacy and a certain connectedness: heads are cut off to feature bulging necks and partial chests, two thirds of an ass is captured in a shaky reach-around, legs, photographed from above, are grotesquely foreshortened. Pictures like these – our sexts/our sex – careen though virtual networks by the millions per day. They have been detached from transmission into cyberspace. In this new world, whole bodies are left behind in favor of their parts and pleasure is found in images, on the level of light and surface. After Kim Kardashian’s sex tape was released, she was asked if she regretted it. “Only that I put my face in it,” she replied. When else in history have we been both author of, and witness to, our own bodies in sex?

– Carmen Winant, Los Angeles, CA, July 2016

Participating artists: Burt Barr; Gregory Carideo; Brock Enright; Jacob Goudreault; Matt Keegan; Mary Reid Kelley; Sadie Laska; France-Lise McGurn; Benny Merris; Melanie Schiff; Tschabalala Self; Carmen Winant; Sarah Wright; Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.