My perversion is the belief in true love

The New York artist Ellen Cantor uses stereotypical images of beauty and violence, as transmitted by the media, along with personal images. In her work she enters the world of carefully cultivated regulations, requirements and prohibitions, and with narrative videos and photomontages she severely disturbs our pre-conditioned conception of good and bad, sex and love, art and trash. In her videos, Cantor juxtaposes shots of sex and violence as a means to integrate the obscenity of realism and to fill in the ellipsis created by commercial film. She utilizes video-tape redubbing as a means for artistic creation, and by negotiating between the private experience of creating videotapes and presenting those works in a public space, Cantor starts an open sexual dialogue with the viewer. Her videotapes are an exploration of the boundaries between the imagined and the real; between the erotic and the pornographic; between the symbolic and the factual; between the public and the private – all of which are central to the debate concerning the display of nudity and sexuality within the art world.