Le Grand Objet & Objet Cam Live

The reclining female nude has a rich heritage across the lineage of the art historical canon.

For many centuries in ancient Greece, only divine goddesses were painted or sculpted in this sacred way, honoring their perfection and purity.

In the Salon of 1814 when Ingre's first showed Le Grand Odalisque, there was wild outrage in the Louvre.  It was the first time that an ordinary woman was featured in this glorified way, much less the socially lowest of the low— a servant girl in a harem. To view the painting was to become a voyeur, guilty of sharing an intimate space with this woman of ill-repute.

This was the dawn of the painted female nude objectified by the “Masculine Gaze.’

In the modern digital landscape, countless young girls now willingly offer stylized versions of themselves as objects for entertainment to unseen viewers. The voyeur is instantly transported through the window of their screens, sharing intimate spaces with the object of their amusement.

Adopting the utilitarian aesthetic of the digitized sex industry, this is the beginning of an artistic ethnography of “Cam-Girl” sub-cultures, comparing the contemporary extensions of the masculine gaze to trends throughout the art historical canon.

Rather than allowing the complexity of their real identities to be organically engaged, countless women now obsessively objectify themselves on social media as well, for the sole aim of collecting as many unseen viewers as they can.

These gestures become symbolic investigations on the contemporary relationship between technology and the current human condition.