CYBER SPACES.

The Lurid, low resolution, pixelated blurriness shared by the photographs in 'Cyberspaces' signals their origin as cheap digital images, in this case frame grabs from internet webcams. Enlarged from a 240 x 320 pixel video stream, the available photographic information - barely usable to begin with, degrades and flattens out, unable to meet the demands of a 50 x 60 cm Lamda Print. Seen live, in full scale, the printed images look over-saturated, tacky and weirdly beautiful. More than anything else, 'Cyberspaces' look overtly like 'art' on first view. Bright colours lend the work a perky and even decorative air, but only until you get past the pixelated surface of these unnervingly evacuated, intimately creepy scenes.

All of the images in 'Cyberspaces' are from sexcams but none of them are populated by the internet prostitutes whose working spaces they portray. Florid colours and low resolution initially lend the images an almost painterly, impressionistic quality and that briefly marks what is really going on here. The vantage point is up close, only one or two meters away and not much higher than the bed, chair or couch. Stuffed animals appear repeatedly, unsettling companions and stand ins for young women who we do not see.

Schmid began working on 'Cyberspaces' at a time where health concerns forced him to pass much of his time indoors, spending what he characterizes as 'too much time on the internet sitting in front of a computer screen.' He decided to make work about people doing what he was doing - normally sitting in front of a computer screen - as a way of questioning the nature of an authentic experience in a virtual domain. Hunting for situations featuring people who sit in front of computers, he eventually arrives at 'people who do it professionally - for sexcams. The first one I entered, it just happened that the women got up and left. I had a picture of an empty sofa and I said, this is exactly what I am hunting for.'

Schmid finds the resulting images of empty stages ' a strange, sad document of what is happening throughout Eastern Europe and Southwest Asia, a huge industry where young girls sell themselves for small sums of money... you look at the objects represented and you get an idea about the age of the young women working there. Basically, these are children's rooms.'