Photo: To Have, Cake Cut, 2007

Fresh out of grad school, Artist Amber Hawk Swanson was looking for love and a new project--so she had a RealDoll made to look just like her. The result—Amber Doll—would become her collaborator and companion. Since then, Amber Hawk Swanson and Amber Doll have traveled the country documenting public response to their complex and controversial relationship. AHS emailed with Scanner’s Nicole Pasulka about her show at Locust Gallery through June 28, why she was after a sex-doll double in the first place and the surprising, sometimes violent, reactions people have to her work.  

Nicole: You commissioned a look-alike RealDoll who is now featured in your photography and video work. What made you want a doll?

Amber Hawk Swanson: After completing a project that involved imaging myself in a sexual way and afterward receiving responses that involved stories of sexual assault, I began reading about sexual assault and the compulsion to reenact trauma. I kept reading the words victim and victimizer and they seemed to exist on two ends of a spectrum that described violence. I found myself more interested in the way those two words potentially overlap. On a conceptual level I was interested in merging them, and as a performer I wanted to embody them simultaneously.

At the same time, I was lonely and found myself longing for companionship. I happened to read a Salon.com article "Just like a woman" by Meghan Laslocky on the subject of RealDoll owners and something clicked. I started "lurking" on Doll Forum, a meeting place site that I linked to from the article, and felt a real affinity to the community of primarily men who own or desire RealDolls. From there I contacted Abyss Corporation, the company that produces RealDolls and began inquiring about a custom order. After a few weeks of negotiating the process, I made arrangements to fly to Los Angeles on my 26th birthday (so Amber Doll and I could share birthdays) to get digitally scanned. From the scan, a Styrofoam printout was produced and the first mold was made. After a few months of waiting for Amber Doll to arrive, I flew to San Marcos, California, where Abyss Corporation is located, to shoot a four-day "Making-of Amber Doll" documentary.

NP: Are you and Amber Doll collaborators?

AHS: At one time I thought of my work with Amber Doll as a collaboration, because I was wrapped up, in a heartfelt way, with the lived performance of experiencing her as a romantic partner and as one of the subjects in my/our work. I was also, at one time, thinking of her as an extension of self and as a negotiation of self. Lately, I've been thinking about Amber Doll as my sexually available silicone replica, which is how she ultimately appears in my work. I take her to ritualized spaces such as wedding receptions, tailgating parties, sorority houses, and theme parks and observe, without intervening, the way that she interrupts the social codes of the space. I still seem to embody victim and victimizer simultaneously in that I abandon Amber Doll to what often ends up as aggressive groups of people "exploring" her. I've been interested in the way Amber Doll is also interpreted as a proxy for me, in seemingly safe or jovial settings like the football tailgating party that I usually describe as having the potential to "take a turn."

NP: Is your relationship still personal and professional?

AHS: While waiting for her arrival, I certainly imagined what Amber Doll and I might do for each other emotionally. After we were finally united, I spent time trying to understand the major impact she'd had on my life. Now, however, while there may be leftover feelings and expectations over our potential personal relationship, we've landed in a space that's much more professional. Just as soon as I profess our professional and not personal relationship, however, I'm sure I'll start missing her (she's currently still in Miami for an exhibition) but I can safely say that for the past six months of production work for To Have, To Hold, and To Violate: Amber and Doll we've been strictly business. We've traveled together, posed together, and met an amazing number of people interested in touching one or both of us, but all for the artwork.

NP: What kind of response have you gotten to your current solo show at Locust Projects in Miami?

AHS: For the show, Amber Doll is participating what I'm calling a "funerary installation," where she is laid out in a casket, surrounded by fresh flowers. A surveillance camera that corresponds to a live feed of viewers' actions with the doll records her casket, along with the area surrounding it. The viewers interacting with Amber Doll are separated from the viewers watching them on the surveillance monitor by a freestanding wall, so after people finish exploring her in the funerary installation, they walk around the wall to discover the monitor and a crowd of onlookers.

NP: How did people react to being so close to Amber Doll in a funeral and gallery space?

AHS: I witnessed perhaps the most aggressive response to Amber Doll's presence at the opening reception for the exhibition while joining the crowd of people watching the live feed monitor. A man wound up and forcefully punched Amber Doll in the face, which ultimately tore her silicone from mouth to jaw. The mediated experience of watching her get punched on the surveillance monitor somehow made it all the more surprising—despite having watched countless other aggressive acts towards Amber Doll throughout the past year and a half.