Peter Tomka, A Bathroom Darkroom
Text by William Cooperman

As companion to the exhibition by Cole Case “Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt” Peter Tomka’s installation in “The Curated Loo” presents itself as a quiet but strikingly strong and complementary counterpoint. The installation brings together photographs, black and white images, black helium balloons, hand towels, leaflets, proof-sheets, toilets, water, sinks and red light, in an ordinary, slyly surreal environment. It is interactive: the magazines must be handled, entrance to and exit from the installation must be negotiated with those waiting to use the bathroom, and the rope that ties us to the safety of the outer world must be loosened.

It starts simply enough. A bathroom door with a hand-written note is the only indication that something awaits within. Shut the door behind and lock it, and you’re alone in a darkened bathroom illuminated only by a bare red fluorescent light. Black and white photographic images are plastered to the wall, just above eyelevel in two bands, the upper band being duplicate images of the lower, but pushed high up against the ceiling, cropped at the top by the ceiling plane. The images are ordinary: snap shots of girlfriends, a standard sex shot of a young man straining at his tank top, lots of chest, skin and muscles showing. An explanation by the artist here: the lower images are not fixed, the images growing more and more darkened over time by exposure to light each time the door’s opened. Small black balloons hug the ceiling, and the red florescent light, as well the high photographs, draw one’s eyes up. There are the usual fixtures – a sink, a toilet – and oddly two hand towels hang by the sink, unexpected domesticity in a public restroom. A wooden rack holds booklets and leaflets containing negative proofs, no apparent order, and somewhat larger format proofs of self-portraits in various stages of undress, fleshy, an image remains, vaguely edgy: a partial view of thighs, torso, dark underwear stretched across hips. Pounding on the door, time to get out, someone else needs to come in.

The exhibition is remembered sometime later: what was that? Like a dream, certain elements emerge, latent images. For those of us who discovered black and white photography as youth, childhood associations are immediate. The bathroom at night transformed into a temporary dark room: switch out the incandescent lights for a safe light, blackout the window. The associations too of scatological productivity, a place to examine privately one’s body in the mirror, to look at dirty magazines, awaken to sexual feelings, and so on come to mind as well. This installation is the private red-light district world of the photographer, burlesque in its darkened red and black palette, masculine and sexy, the center of productive work. The black balloons, ideas pressing upwards to be expressed, the silver halide in photographic prints that turns black upon exposure to light. And the balloons re-emerge in the outside world of the gallery bathed in white paint and light, colorful canvases, the black balloons now strewn about the floor, mixing with the crowd, a quiet, brooding reminder of the dark room and the continuity of the two exhibitions, one dark, one light, coexisting.