SINGAPORE — Do you have a hard time sleeping? Drop by FOST Gallery where there could be a bed that will knock you out in no time.

That, theoretically, is how one life-sized contraption at the art space is supposed to work. Yang Jie and Mavis Seah’s If The Bed Is A Machine, Does It Produce Sleep? is an odd-looking “bed” that has footrests that audiences can stomp on to trigger wood panels that whack anyone on the head (not too hard, of course). Below the bed, little cotton sheep seemingly scamper away to freedom from a rather mangled pillow. It’s one of the more eccentric works in the ongoing group show, A Thing Or Two About The Bed.

Yes, beds figure a lot in contemporary art - take brash British artist’s Tracey Emin’s famous confessional installation, My Bed, for example. Closer to home, you have, among others, a performance art piece by Ezzam Rahman and Marla Bendini using a bunk bed; and Kai Lam and Lee Wen’s Give Peace A Chance Redux, which revisits another famous bed moment: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 “bed-in” protest piece.

The show is curated by artist Tang Ling Nah, who came up with the idea because she had a slipped disc back in 2005. The pain forced her to stay in bed. “I remember just lying there and looking at the ceiling and seeing all these imagery,” she recalled. A deja vu moment occurred during a residency in Taipei in 2010. She eventually began to rope people in.

“The bed is a subject matter but not necessarily as a physical form,” she explained. “I wanted to let viewers know that art can be drawn from very mundane objects in life. But at the same time, the bed is very present in various stages of our lives.”

POPULAR BEDS

Humour and aspects of pop culture are seen in a number of pieces. Tay Bak Chiang’s diptych ink paintings Bed Of Icy Jade and Rope Bed references moments in the wuxia novel The Return Of The Condor Heroes (where the heroine sleeps on both “beds”). Yang and Seah’s contraption also has a literary link — the title is a nod to author Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the piece alludes to a society obsessed with the mechanical. “We always upgrade our gadgets, so can we really modify the bed to improve our sleep?” said Yang.

atelier | small’s prints propose the construction of various “cat nap beds” scattered throughout the city. Which is probably something that Hong Kong artist Tang Kwok-Hin would appreciate. His work Dreamer is all about recording his dreams, a process that began with him walking throughout the city and sleeping outdoors in the daytime, while staying awake at night. He would sleep in libraries, McDonalds outlets, parks, playgrounds and buses, only to be awoken by his self-timed alarm. The drawings that come out seem random and loaded with symbolisms. “They all look like they’re part of a crime scene. I don’t know why,” he mused.

Reconstruction is also at the heart of what’s probably the show’s most complex piece, Lucy Davis’ Together Again (Wood:Cut) Part IV: Art History. The latest incarnation of a long-term project involving an old teak bed, Davis has created small dioramas that play on light and shadow, all featuring fragmented recreations of seminal woodblock prints, such as Lee Kee Boon’s Nanyang University, Tan Tee Chie’s Persuading and Lim Yew Kuan’s After The Fire (Bukit Ho Swee Fire). Imprinted on the pieces of paper that comprise the works is the wood grain of the old teak bed.

“In a sense, you could say it is the dream of the bed,” she said.

LONELY BEDS

Dreams, flights of fancy and humour are tempered by some of the show’s more sombre pieces. Andree Weschler’s Cemetery Of Innocence installation comprises a bed on which is laid out a used wedding dress seemingly being weighed down by 1,280 small porcelain pieces of floral or shellfish patterns, a rather sad forlorn image.

A subtle kind of passing is suggested by Arron Teo’s 4D, a triptych of discarded couches around the HDB. The photographer shot these at the dead of night around Serangoon North, before they were cleared by cleaners.

“They’ve been a support for people, those who sit down to tell their stories, but no one actually knows these (couches’) stories,” he explained.

Finally, Janice Chin looks at animal deaths in My Deathbed. Arranged like tombstones, small lightboxes feature dead insects, lizards and even the odd cat or two. It’s a project she’s been working on for the past three to four years, with some 200 images accumulated and up on Facebook. Like the abandoned furniture in Teo’s works, Chin also hopes to commemorate the things that have been rendered insignificant by us. “We don’t pay any attention to them. And how we now look at their deaths may hopefully resonate with how we look at ours. Will we be as lonely as them?”

A Thing Or Two About The Bed runs until Nov 3, 11am to 7pm, FOST Gallery, 1 Lock Road, Gillman Barracks. Free admission.

There will be a performance (inspired by sleepwalking) by the Strangeweather Movement Group on Sept 13, 8pm.

A storytelling session by Kamini Ramachandran on Oct 12, 3.30pm.

Lucy Davis will hold a talk on Oct 19, 3pm.

For more information, call 6694 3080 or e-mail info [at] fostgallery.com.