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<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nNever more stable than a rainbow<\/em>, 2022, sheer curtain, rope, and curtain rod, variable dimensions<\/p>\n\n\n\n Less hopeful is Just as soon as a verb<\/em>, the installation on the wall of the adjoining gallery \u2013 similarly ghostly, but a spectre tumbling into the ominous. Our deference is to Hay\u2019s artist statement and \u201cbardos,\u201d a Tibetan Buddhist word describing the period of chaos, shock, change and fear that a person experiences when they die. Just as soon as a verb<\/em> is a skeletal hangman on life-support, its bleached Styrofoam bones splayed between ceiling, wall, and floor by ropes and sand bags. Its dying wishes are nursed by the gallery attendant as sand bucket pours at four-hour intervals \u2013 cycles of imperceptible heaves and sags. Sand is ingested in the cranial head bucket and disgorged down the spinal column gullet to the bucket on the floor like granules of time in a bifurcated hourglass. Might this be the artist\u2019s response to “these days of incipient ecological collapse,\u201d her expression of “urgency to the question of how we relate to the objects around us?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just as soon as a verb<\/em>, 2022, rope, sand, fabric, and repurposed styrofoam, variable dimensions<\/p>\n\n\n\n The artist\u2019s Bardo<\/em> boxes serve as vitrines displaying cuts resembling highly-magnified animal and vegetable tissue. Pale pink, red, blue, green layers of watercolour and gouache in the foreground are suggestive of the chlorophyll of leaf and under-the-skin flesh, vein, and corpuscle. The meandered looped strings of layered paper form a sealed labyrinthine chamber \u2013 visible, but impenetrable somehow. The expressionism of Edvard Munch comes to mind. As the word suggests, \u201cBardo!\u201d might be the incantatory scream of the soul in the transit from life as it crosses to death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bardo 2<\/em> (left) and Bardo 3<\/em> (right) both 2022, hand cut paper, watercolour, and gouache 24.75 x 20 x 2.75 inches<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Dreams of awakening here in this brightness<\/em> series of diminutive wall sculptures hint at a new life form altogether \u2013 leafy flecks of vegetable with the animal, revealing cotton roots and tendrils with the polymer clay and painted bronze. Would these sprigs be the imagined after life of Hay\u2019s humankind \u2013 life after civilization\u2019s bardo? In Hay\u2019s imagined life as a tree, souls might find themselves counting tree rings for a thousand years or more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dreams of awakening here in this brightness<\/em> (L-R) No.17, No.18 and No.20 each 2022, watercolour, paper, polymer clay, painted bronze, and cotton 15.75 x 4 x 4 inches<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hay’s Let\u2019s not go back to normal<\/em> exhibition has furnished us with a bucketful of seed for thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Steve Rockwell<\/p>\n\n\n\n Images are courtesy of Christopher Cutts Gallery<\/p>\n\n\n\n *Exhibition information: Sherri Hay, Let\u2019s not go back to normal<\/a>, <\/em>January 22 \u2013 March 5, 2022, Christopher Cutts Gallery, 21 Morrow Ave, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tue \u2013 Sat, 10 \u2013 6pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n