Press Release
Camille Henrot presented a set of newly commissioned sculptures and paintings from her Wet Job (2020-21) series at The Lewis’s Building. In these works, Henrot makes use of the familiar art-historical trope of the mother and child in order to foreground obscured aspects of motherhood and their reflections in society at large. The overriding theme of alienation is crystallized in the figure of the woman expressing milk with a breast pump. By operating on the body as a field of action rather than of identity, the breast pump construes the machine as a model for thinking about the body. It amplifies the shame of animal excess (leaking breasts), of performing alone what should be done with another (like with masturbation), and of requiring the supplementary aid of a machine in the first place. Henrot resists the reduction of motherhood’s embedded subjectivity to biology, as is often done to deprive women’s voices, and provides an intriguing view of alienation in the name of liquidity and consumption.
