Shake ’n quake
BY Nadja Sayej
Illustration courtesy Sherri Hay
Snow globes typically represent wistful worlds we dream of stepping into, but the scenes inside Sherri Hay’s disaster globes are not places you would want to visit. In her series Wish You Were Here, the Toronto artist creates miniature worlds that have been struck by catastrophe, remaining forever in shambles.
“They are a souvenir of events you would not want a souvenir of,” says Hay. One globe contains a crumbling building with half of its contents gouged out. Give it a shake and amputated limbs, office equipment and car wheels tumble from the building’s windows. Another has street lamps and telephone wires protruding from a pile of collapsed rooftops and dented steel. A shake tosses the wires into the sky. There are 16 of these scenes in all, which Hay showed at Toronto’s Christopher Cutts Gallery this past winter, and will be showing next at Tokyo’s Megumi Ogita Gallery in June.
Hay, whose artistic practice has ranged from realistic charcoal drawings to playful mixed-media pieces that repurpose everyday objects, started the snow globe series two years ago, inspired by the tsunamis that struck Southeast Asia in December, 2004. The scenes inside the globes are crafted from polystyrene and figurines you’d typically find in hobby shops.
Her choice to use snow globes sets her apart from artists who take a more documentary approach to disasters— people such as Louisiana-based Rolland Golden, who built a series of paintings around the messy aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who has made a career of capturing the disastrous results of industrial development.
“They’re extreme, they’re disasters. I don’t see them as being painful, but part of a cycle,” says the 40-year-old artist.
Hay’s globes are interactive sculptures. As viewers pick up and shake them, they become the force that creates the disasters. In a way, it’s a strange inversion of real-world catastrophes where, as Hay points out, “You never know when one is going to strike.”
