Tomas Symons

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

The Viewer and The Viewed

Voyeurism is the desire in one to see the lives of others that they are not necessarily meant to see. I want to capture the feeling of looking into someone else’s life and make the viewer of my art a voyeur themselves. Voyeurism is a clinical disorder because of its practice to gain sexual gratification in voyeurs from viewing those engaging in sexual acts. I am however working with non-sexual voyeurism, an act that I believe derives from people’s curiosity into the lives of others. This distinction is important, because it is not done for one’s own pleasure and can be triggered from a broader range of emotions or circumstances. It can be evoked from dread, anticipation, loneliness, trauma to name a few. 

Personally, mine comes from curiosity in the lives of others. Parts of people’s lives that aren’t constantly seen or shown to the world or the ‘private’, an aspect of life that continually gets blurred through social media and surveillance. Voyeurism centers around the act of looking, my attempt to manifest this act of looking is to use windows. Windows beckon one to look regardless of which side of the window (interior or exterior) one is on. ‘Windows’ in this context create a viewer and the viewed. Those on the outside have a desire to investigate the space inside. Those on the inside do not want the space to be viewed from the outside. While this contradiction may make it clear which is the viewer and which is the viewed, it is still grey. Those on the inside can use the window to observe what is on the outside just as well, becoming the voyeur. My work reflects internalized surveillance and the awareness that we are potentially the subject of someone else’s gaze. Social media especially blurs the lines of what is private and public. 

On every social media platform, users have their own personalized feed dictated by what we view, like and comment on. When we look through a window (literally or metaphorically), we’re present but not participating. We observe without intervening. This aligns with the idea that non-sexual voyeurism can be motivated by curiosity, empathy, dread, or loneliness. The vacancy of the viewpoint reflects this. It is an emotionally suspended position, where the viewer looks but cannot act, connecting further to the idea of voyeurism as an act of curiosity rather than pleasure. 

Jacques Derrida’s notion of the parergon, from The Truth in Painting, offers a useful way to think about the window as a conceptual and visual device in my work. The parergon refers to the frame that both separates and joins the inside and outside of an image. The window functions similarly: it marks a threshold between the viewer and the viewed, yet the boundary it draws is unstable. It allows one to see through, across, and be reflected in it. The window turns into a site of difference, where the need to know is constantly postponed and where the ethics of seeing are discussed.