by MATTHEW WOODLEY

Call it what you want - hand-to-gland combat, answering the bone-a-phone, playing the pink oboe, summoning the genie, massaging the man in the boat, ménage à moi, pumping gas at self-service island, turning the earthworm into a spitting cobra, tugging the tapioca tube, whackin', jackin', jerkin' off or just plain old masturbationism - you can bet the price of high-speed Internet that everybody's doing it and, under the eye of God almighty, they're probably going to do it again soon.

Aside from deities, partners, porn and men in sweatpants, though, ironing one's wrinkles is a private affair, and the masturbator's mind is far less attuned to what they look like than what other people look like. That's what makes Sefi Amir's Never Needed Nobody exhibition so intriguing.

Over the past few months, Amir gave 12 people digital cameras and the simple instructions to take a picture of themselves during orgasm, "straight on and try to get your whole head in the shot, please." She then turned the moments of bliss into a series of clean, photorealistic portraits of what she, her friends and acquaintances look like during climax. (Cool your jets, boys, shoulders-up only.) The paintings evoke a peculiar feeling of interest and awkwardness - less of an excuse-me-I-have-to-go-to-the-bathroom one than an indefinable compulsion to stand and stare.

"They aren't necessarily sexual on the surface," Amir says. "Many people look like they're sleeping or singing or things like that. So I'm curious about how people feel looking at them because it's so much about extrapolation. It's not as much about what you're seeing but what you're thinking and the connection you make once you figure out what's going on."

The experiment in extrapolation also revealed something about gender, Amir discovered: namely that, for all their living by the fat of the hand, she was able to recruit just one male model. "I had one guy who said to me, ‘You can take a picture of my dick while I'm masturbating but not of my face - it's too personal,'" she laughs. "I think there's a higher lever of attachment to privacy about that kind of stuff. Guys really like to talk, but they don't like to show, perhaps, as women do."

Such an exhibitionist context, not to mention the odd expression of über-bliss, raises another social issue: orgasm faking - usually not an issue in masturbation practice, but something Amir took into consideration with her models.

"I accepted the possibility that there are one or two who faked," she says. "It's a performative-personality thing and it's possible that, of these people, there's someone who really wanted to express something. I just was surprised at how many people were curious and liked the idea of participating and being so self-aware, so conscious of an act that you perform regularly without really watching yourself doing it."

Never Needed Nobody gets off to a start today, Thursday, Aug. 11, 8 p.m.–midnight at Pharmacie Esperanza (5490 St-Laurent), until Sept. 4