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Shary Boyle new exhibition Stranger
Shary Boyle's new exhibition Stranger: Review
When Toronto artist Shary Boyle headed north to work at West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in March 2011, Nunavut was still locked down in winter cold, and the cooperative's small studio served as an intimate shelter from the wind and snow whipping across the tundra. "Like a lot of people, I've always been interested in the north, it's solitude and the richness of its life and culture," says Boyle, whose exhibition of works on paper, Stranger, which opened Saturday at the Jessica Bradley Gallery, were created during residencies in Cape Dorset, Nuavut, and Bruno, Sask. "I called the show Stranger because, when I was in Cape Dorset, I was acutely aware of being a foreigner there."
When Toronto artist Shary Boyle headed north to work at West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in March 2011, Nunavut was still locked down in winter cold, and the cooperative's small studio served as an intimate shelter from the wind and snow whipping across the tundra. "Like a lot of people, I've always been interested in the north, it's solitude and the richness of its life and culture," says Boyle, whose exhibition of works on paper, Stranger, which opened Saturday at the Jessica Bradley Gallery, were created during residencies in Cape Dorset, Nuavut, and Bruno, Sask. "I called the show Stranger because, when I was in Cape Dorset, I was acutely aware of being a foreigner there."
At 40, Boyle has had a couple of big years,[url=http://nikefree.mobilejeti.com]nike free run[/url], and is on the cusp of breaking through to a major international career. In 2009, she won the coveted Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and in 2010 and 2011 a survey of her work, Flesh and Blood, organized by the Universit du Qubec Montral, Montreal and the AGO, toured major venues across Canada. And this past June, the director of the National Gallery of Canada, Marc Mayer, announced Boyle will represent Canada at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
"The West Baffin Eskimo CoOperative isn't a regular residency that you just apply for and go to, they are very cautious about who they let in," Boyle says. "I had a show with the wonderful Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona, who has an exhibit at Feheley Fine Arts right now in Toronto, and I got to know other people, and after two years I was in a position to lobby to go up to Cape Dorset." As it turned out, in Cape Dorset, Boyle worked at the same table as Ashoona, and one of the happy results is the beautiful largescale collaborative drawing in ink, gouache, and colored pencil "Universal Cobra Pussy (Titled by Shuvinai)" (2011). In that drawing, scaly mermaid creatures rendered by Boyle writhe on bloodsmeared ice, while above, in Ashoona's distinctive hand, obsessive worldforms float.
That Boyle is fascinated by the far north and by Inuit art and culture should come as no surprise: whether it's in porcelain or oil paint, gouache or pencil or for that matter the shadow puppets that haunt theatrical works such as Everything Under The Moon at the Harbourfront Center last February, Boyle's art invariably has a folkloric quality that is by turns dreamlike, lavish, perverse, and sometimes incredibly funny. In the ink and gouache "Ljiraat" (2011), a ghoulish figure with smoldering red eyes wears a live wolf pelt as a coat, its snarling jaw clamped on the top of her head.
Working in the north, according to Boyle, is an exercise in patience, quiet, and simplicity. "At Cape Dorset, everyone sat around a common table, no one talked very much, we mostly listened to the radio," she says. "We spent the whole day just drawing together."
Boyle may be drawn to fantastic, mythic creatures, but in many of the works in Stranger, the mythic seems subordinate to the austere force of nature itself. In the ink and gouache drawing "Northern Lights on Bruno" (2012), two dark, wildeyed and wildhaired beasts worthy of Francisco Goya's sinister late black paintings waive a scroll over a simple country church, but what is frightening about the picture is the vast, swirling, blue night sky behind them.
Concurrent will the exhibition at the Jessica Bradley Gallery, a selection of works from Boyle's contribution to the 2010 exhibit at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, Breaking Boundaries, is on view at the luxurious new Louis Vuitton store in Yorkville. Louis Vuitton may seem a curious venue for contemporary art, but Boyle's ceramic work, finely wrought porcelain figurines legs with gold slippers sticking out from frilly party dresses, headless girls perched on tree stumps are as jewellike as they are demented.
By Boyle's high standards, Stranger is not a hugely ambitious show; it serves more as an intimation of the directions her work has been taking since Flesh and Blood was at the AGO in 2010. That is understandable enough. She has been spending most of her time planning the big Venice exhibit, which will open next June and attending fundraising events. "The Venice project is going really well," Boyle comments, drawing a finger across her lips to make clear she has no intention of revealing details. "Venice is an opportunity to think big and to be part of an international conversation. It's not as though I haven't had big ideas before, but now I'm going to have the resources to do something about it."