Darkrooms – Homme Made on view at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York is curated by Avi Feldman and includes multimedia work by ten young artists that makes it clear that a presentation and analysis of homoerotic and personal sexual codes in our polymorphous sexual world has not lost its cache or relevance. Not since the Log Cabin exhibition at Artist Space in New York in 2005, has a group show expressed succinctly how young artist today view sexuality through a different type of lens, not simply through a photographic lens but through the bytes and digital hybrids of new technologies such as the internet, webcams, digital cameras and chat rooms, whose usefulness or tragedy, depending on your point-of-view, is their ability to make sexual connections not only more anonymous but also renders quaint and slightly old-fashioned the fetishizing of spaces like the backroom of a sex club or even secluded public restroom, rest stop or park. Two artists in particular emphasize how our new world’s purely voyeuristic sensibility and insatiable need for sexualized imagery and sexual contact is often a lonely exercise yet provides more interesting fodder for creative artmaking.  Dean Sameshima in Figures of Lust Furtively Encountered in the Nights, 2004, shows three appropriated images of faceless men whose pixilated style looks exactly like the type of do-it-yourself pics you could see on any gay dating or hookup sex website. The images are soulless unless you accept the notion that a man’s soul resides in his pecs, abs or in his ass. Amir Fattal’s split-screen video Changed Positions, 2006, presents spellbinding erotic encounters between men, which are an exploration of space where internet encounters happen and the body. The video style and conversation are so deadpan and banal that you will find yourself at once and the same somewhat bored and transfixed. -Wayne Northcross