lullaby

2005

Exhibited in "Sweet shit" Bossy Bitches collective exhibition at Lennox Contemporary, Toronto

lullaby is an interactive "singing" outdoor water faucet installed indoors on a gallery wall, that emits a lullaby sung by the artist. The volume is controlled by the audience through an embedded potentiometer inside the faucet's handle. lullaby invites the viewer to turn the handle of an outdoor water faucet mounted on the gallery wall and thereby controlling the amplitude of the song via circuit connected to a source of looped audio.

Rather than being a source of water, the tap emits the sound of the artist¹s untrained voice singing a french song or lullaby comprised of lyrics revealing a myriad of complaints. Playing on the word tap and possible meanings that evoke the drawing of water or the mining of goods or information (tree tap, wire tap) lullaby involves a tension between the soothing flow of song and an unending list of woes and a dynamic of spillage between a potentially unwilling person or object and it¹s source.

As the viewer turns the handle of the faucet they are able to control the volume of the lullaby and likewise able to simply turn on or off the sweetly sung kavetching at the source.

lullaby from Myfanwy Ashmore on Vimeo.