German native Gerald Förster perceived sexual culture as repressed and taboo in America. His desire to bring it out of the shadows sent him in the streets of New York with an 8 x 10 inch film camera. Förster’s C-Prints capture the urban landscape in deep focus, while the subjects appear in a perceptual blur--their bodies so deeply tangled that they become one amalgamated form. Taken from distant vantage points, the photographs present Förster as the ultimate voyeur whose lens probes and discovers couples fornicating against parked cars, clinging to a chain linked fence, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and on a basketball court. Three video installations accompany the photographs and are displayed in Lucite frames on the gallery walls. The grossly pixilated video of couples screwing under streetlights is at once arresting and discomfiting. Förster subjects we, his viewers to replicate the same voyeuristic act of looking that he did in creating the series. “Nocturnal” however is more an examination of culture than it is one of voyeurism. Förster solicited his own colleagues, friends and also strangers from the Internet ranging in age from 18 to 65. Their participation is realized as they display no apparent shame in their lack of discretion. Real or staged, Förster establishes a hyper reality where the identity of the couples are so obscured that sexuality literally becomes submerged in urbanity.
Published courtesy of ArtScene ©2009
