Camilla Singh/Sherri Hay
"Camilla Singh/Sherri Hay" by Andrea Carson, Spring 2007, pp. 95-96
When Camilla Singh was given the topic “sex and technology” for a commission for the Women’s Art Resource Centre, she and her collaborator, Sherri Hay, knew immediately that they didn’t want to be didactic. Instead, they would create a subjective experience that would reveal the essential links between the two phenomena while leaving the viewer room for interpretation.
In the exhibition, the WARC gallery was empty save for an enormous, glowing pink orb made from balloons encased in a kind of mesh. If you peered hard into the balloons, you could catch glimpses of an underlying structure. Occasionally, mysterious, disjointed sounds issued from within the mass. The walls surrounding the sculpture were painted in shades of pink that suggested an abstract landscape, or a backdrop of a valley scene from a children’s television show. The sculpture could have been a children’s fort or, more likely, a womb.
The artists’ intent was to explore similarities and differences between sex and technology: communication, procreation, intimacy and alienation. Sex is messy, fluid, vulnerable stuff. It is a universal thing of immense complexity. Technology, on the other hand, has enabled humankind’s advancement ever since fire was mastered. It bears a determined, ambitious, masculine character and affects every aspect of our lives, yet is intimately tied to the limitations of our knowledge.
The procreative attributes of both sex and technology reflect the fact that individual experience restricts and enables all potential, whether artistic, technological or sexual. For the artists, the balloons suggest both divisibility and wholeness, or perhaps simultaneous communication and alienation. They also represent the potential contained within the womb.
A viewer can’t help but engage physically and mentally with sculpture, and here the viewer’s relationship was to a somewhat comforting but mostly distancing artwork: suggestions of communication, procreation and intimacy were limited and a sense of alienation was unmistakable. For Michael Fried, writing in Art and Objecthood, a thing only becomes art when a viewer is prompted to look beyond it as a physical object to something that is not literally there. It can’t be easy to create something that brings together grandiose, diverse subjects that threaten to overshadow everything else. Here, the sculpture drew the viewer in, while its overt objecthood resisted full engagement with ideas of sex and technology.
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