Engage Me
Glynis Humphrey’s multi-media installation Breathing Under Water is a highly experiential and ultimately, personal work of art. Within two of the exhibition spaces, the artist has constructed an environment, comprised of sculptural, video and auditory elements, that encourages the bodily and psychological engagement of the audience. It is a space of “activated spectatorship” that at once lays itself open for individual viewer’s participation and interpretation while allowing for the artist’s investigation of her own corporeal existence.
The project grew from Humphrey’s need to make space for an experience of her body that went beyond her visual relationship to it. “I didn’t want to look in the mirror anymore,” she explains, all too cognizant that her physique does not conform to society’s delusive beauty standards. “I wanted to tap into my body memory, to allow my body to speak on its own, and to really listen to it.” To do so, Humphrey undertook a week-long experiment. Draped in a flowing white cotton dress, she submerged herself daily in a blacked-out diving tank and asked an all-female film crew to help record her experiences. Floating through the dark water with the flimsy fabric billowing and undulating around her, Humphrey concentrated on her own physicality, allowing herself to descend to a place that she describes as being outside language and beyond description, a place “where the inside and the outside of ourselves is allowed to meet.”
It is this place that Humphrey has recreated in Breathing Under Water. Projecting the highly cinematic footage of herself as the backdrop in each salon, Humphrey has hung a series of enormous white weather balloons within the dimly lit gallery spaces. The chloroprene orbs are discretely wired with speakers that transform them into resonators that pulse and vibrate, emitting a soundtrack recorded by Humphrey composed of a multitude of human heartbeats. It is not through my ears, however, that I first detect these palpitations, but through my body as I approach the softly glowing spheres. Filling the centre of the first room, one gargantuan balloon hangs weightlessly, swollen to eight feet in diameter. As I rest both hands on its satiny surface, the vibrations ripple through my fingers, traveling up my arms and neck into my ears. Allowing the balloon to pulse and shiver in my palms, I close my eyes and concentrate on this sensation, becoming less and less aware of the other visitors streaming in and out of the space around me.
Sometime later, I enter the second gallery, in which six lustrous orbs are hung with precision throughout the space — one hovers directly over the doorway, emitting pulses that ripple over my head as I enter, while its twin floats in the gallery’s back corner, under which a chair invites visitors to sit. Weaving my way around four smaller balloons that are linked together with the same sound system, and dangle like a string of pearls inches from the floor, I let my hands sweep over their round curves and watch Humphrey’s hypnotic video; like the artist, I too become increasingly aware of my own corporeality with each passing moment. As she swims within the folds of cotton, the watery score weaves with the low beats emanating from the balloons, creating a visceral wall of sound that washes over me, both from within and beyond my body.
It is through this emphasis on sensory immediacy and physical participation that Breathing Under Water creates the opportunity for activated spectatorship, where meaning is generated not entirely from the content of the work, but also through the viewer’s reaction to and interaction with it. “I wanted to create a space where people would trust themselves, to spend the time to let themselves go and be taken somewhere.” Left open to infinite interpretations, from the profound to the surreal, this space is one of vulnerability, of beauty, and ultimately, of personal discovery.