Jake Foster

Artist Statement

Through my art practice, I hope to create conversations around queer desire and digital sex work through various modes of artmaking including performance, sculpture, drawing, and new media. My work investigates how webcam technologies are used to facilitate sexual intimacy.

The performance Sacrament for a Pandemic is based around a quote from Douglas Crimp in 1987: it is our promiscuity that will save us. In a refusal of respectability politics that sought to blame queer people for the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Crimp asserted that it was queer peoples intimate bonds made during sex which made collective organizing and radical care for one another possible. Repeating the quote, I ritually eat and drip a semen-like fluid over my body. The performance was staged on the erotic webcam site Chaturbate in December 2020, at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Video documentation of the performance is presented on a deconstructed TV screen, foregrounding the material reality of digital sexual interactions.

Tracing Desire is a series of drawings which are made by placing a polyester film over a computer screen while watching male cam models, sex workers who broadcast live shows on the internet via webcam. While interacting with and paying the models, the contours of their body are traced. A map of the technosexual interaction between the artist and the model emerges and time is compressed into a still image, serving as a record of queer desire.