Peter Tomka, Watering Hole
Text by Patrick R. Crowley

In Watering Hole, Peter Tomka presents a suite of photographs whose iconography of liquid and its libidinal economy flow between public showers, cruising grounds, champagne celebrations, and the titanic infrastructure of the water supply in the American West. Here, for example, we find a self-portrait of the artist in an L.A. Aquatics Center whose voyeurism shuttles between an autoscopophilic gaze and the viewer’s furtive glance; a found image of Jerry Buss, the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers famous for dousing his victorious players in champagne, getting a reciprocal treatment from Magic Johnson; the jet of a water fountain parabolically shooting up and cascading down the lips of a young man whose gaping mouth telegraphs horniness and boredom with the Hollywood sign appropriately looming in the distance; or the Power of Water Fountain in Lafayette Park, commissioned by the federally-sponsored Public Works Administration Program, that serves as a sculptural allegory of aqueous dominion whose dilapidated state mirrors our contemporary climate catastrophe.

The erotics of these liquids—water, booze, and, at least notionally, urine—and the bodies they separate intermingle, and are visually fungible, at the level of the image. But they are also developed through a decidedly materialist dimension embedded not only in the systems of extraction that supply the silver gelatin process (indexed by Tomka’s working title, “Silver Shower”), but also in the labor that is performed in the black box of the dark room. There, a projector-cum-enlarger pokes through a makeshift glory hole; an inflatable Tom of Finland waterproof bed sheet catches the drips from paper prints hung to dry on a clothesline after their chemical bath. For Tomka, the occultation of this labor, its almost phantasmagorical quality, trades on the dual sense of the dark room, the camera obscura, as a potential site of both imagistic latency and sexual anonymity that ultimately irrupts into visibility.

At the same time, the series locates a fetishization of these fluid dynamics in a manner that is particular to the city of Los Angeles. “Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.” So begins Joan Didion’s 1977 essay “Holy Water” in which the Californian details an obsessive interest in the comings and goings of this essential, but precious resource: “The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where the water is.” Like Didion, Tomka also likes to think about exactly where the water is, where it has been, and where it will go: a defunct fountain, a handsome face, a locker room floor. To think about the flow of water like this, to ponder how it is carefully corralled through damns and siphons and pumps and drains, whether of stone and metal or flesh and blood, is ultimately to think about control and the desire that shapes it.