Caroline Alexander Art
The Lipstick Caryatids
Cynthia Imogen Hammond, Montreal 2019
The Lipstick Caryatids was created by Cynthia Imogen Hammond's as a site-specific performance for the grounds of the Candian Centre for Architecture (CCA), presented as part of her Promenade Parlante series, in collaboration with fifteen architects, artists, art and architectural historians. I took part as a performer, working through the choreography with Hammond, rehearsing it with the other performers beforehand.
Approximately 100 attendees arrived at the CCA on a spring day, each given a bilingual audio guide, set to gentle music. Pressing play, they were led onto the lawn, discovering fifteen women standing motionless, dressed in white, wearing bright red lipstick. The audio narrated the building's gendered history. We walked slowly, forming a line, facing the long white façade. At the moment the story described Phyllis Lambert's role in saving the building, we blew it a collective kiss.
In her writing about this project Hammond explains that this gesture reached back to a nearly lost detail: in 1973, photographer Brian Merrett, hearing the building faced demolition, documented its interior, hoping to preserve some record of it before it disappeared. Phyllis Lambert, seeing these images, purchased the building instead, restoring it. Among Merrett's photographs: a bedroom once shared by four young women, its fireplace adorned with marble caryatids — figures the residents had embellished themselves, giving them rouge, mascara, bright red lipstick. That fireplace was later lost to fire. Merrett's photograph remains one of the only traces of the decades this building served as a home for women.
This history, along with full details of Promenade Parlante, comes from Cynthia Imogen Hammond's own account of the project at www.cynthiahammond.org.
