Shary Boyle: Flesh and Blood at the AGO

By Brooke Wayne
Instructor: Pete Smith

“Flesh and Blood” is the newest exhibition by Scarborough-born Shary Boyle, also curated and organized by Louise Dery and Galerie de I’UQUAM. This exhibition will be travelling across Canada over the next year. Additionally, Boyle is the recipient of the 2009 Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO for her outstanding contribution to visual arts in Canada. As a result, most of her work on display is entirely new and created explicitly for the show.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Boyle works seamlessly between drawing, painting, sculpture, projection and installations. Her 28 works are dispersed across four large and brightly lit rooms (one being completely dark with blacklighting) in the AGO, four pieces of which are large-scale installations. Flesh and Blood immerses the viewer in Boyle’s dark vision of allegorical myths and childhood fairytales playing out a variety of disturbing emotions. In particular, Boyle fixates on contradictions; life and death, love and pain, vulnerability and loneliness.

A salient portion of her exhibition is comprised of sculptures that range in scale from as tiny as a child’s hand to larger than a basketball player. These works are made in a variety of mediums such as porcelain, enamel, polymer clay, gouache, ink and beads, combining both contemporary and traditional materials. One room displays eight of her sculptures in a circle with one in the middle, surrounded by Old Master paintings along with a few of her own oil paintings. Another room is enveloped in darkness with only spotlights illuminating her smaller sculptures, which stands across from a large one. The results are striking combined with the phosphorous and fluorescent glows from the blacklight. Boyle’s larger-than-life sculptural pieces convey a sense of verisimilitude at first glance, but upon closer inspection, reveal the intricate and painstaking work of the artist’s hand. One of her works, entitled, Virus (White Wedding), 2009, 153 x 153 x 153 cm, combines the use of sculpture, a data projector, acetate paper and ink to create a mesmerizing and whimsical effect that contradicts her dark themes.

Boyle’s selection of Old Master paintings in one of her rooms both oddly conflicts and compliments their symbolic imagery with her own created ones. Relating to both mythological and allegoric roots, Boyle’s use of porcelain, enamel, glaze and luster make the sculptural pieces shine under the wash lighting, emanating some sort of ethereal and universal aura. One in particular example is The Lute Player, 2010, 26 x 24 x 24 cm, which portrays a young woman playing her electric guitar plugged into an amp. What truly makes it unique from other ceramic pieces is the use of beading as the cord connecting the guitar to the amp. The beading is a surprise texture that, combined with the feeling of connectedness, juxtaposes with the nude woman to create a sense of seductive power. It seems as if Boyle is encouraging the audience to become the voyeur in this gaze.

In all of Boyle’s work, I find myself feeling torn between both fascination and utter discomfort with the childlike rendering and fragility of these porcelain sculptures. They depict dangerously dark themes of the human scope of mind, portraying nude bodies of children, men and women in vulnerable states. There is a sense of something slightly off-kilter in all of her works, as if these bodies are not quite as real as we perceive them to be.
Her exquisite detailing in these sculptures play up to her technical and versatile material strengths. She is unafraid to push beyond the mold of traditional sculpture, incorporating beading and contemporary iconography into her works. However, some of her oil paintings on panel do not hold the same sense of curiosity and wonder that her ceramic pieces convey. At worst, they feel unfinished, craving for more of Boyle’s laborious detail.

Retrospectively, Flesh and Blood is not for the weak-hearted, nor for the weak-minded; it is an exhibition that feeds your mind and encourages it to cultivate, link and explore some kind of contrast in play. It is not simply about the flesh and blood of human bodies or the fragility of them; it is about the way these bodies carry themselves. It is how these bodies interact that echoes our deep unconscious desires and inner turmoil. As Boyle puts it succinctly, it is “the ache of our bodies, sweet or painful” and this is essentially the first and last impression Boyle leaves us with. There is no greater and twisted pleasure than experiencing such extreme polarities simultaneously and Shary Boyle’s “Flesh and Blood” is one of them.

Brooke Wayne is a second year drawing and painting major at OCADU.

Evan Lee: Forest Fire Series

By Vivian Peachey
Instructor: Pete Smith

Evan Lee is part of a group show - In Dialogue with Carr at the Vancouver Art Gallery that runs until January 3, 2011. Along with contemporary artists Douglas Coupland, Liz Magor, and Marianne Nicolson, the artists were ‘to draw out a dialogue between Carr’s legacy and the myriad ways in which artists respond to it”.

Of the many themes broached by the artists, and in dialogue with the work of Carr, the making of a national visual identity and new ways of experiencing our vast and wild Canadian landscape factor significantly in all of the artists work. Acting as a backdrop and featured throughout the show are Carr’s paintings of British Columbia’s energized landscapes featuring Carr’s iconic forests and First Nations totem poles.

Vancouver artist Evan Lee’s offering, are a series of manipulated photograph-paintings described as post-photography. Taking images from the British Columbia Forest Service, Lee prints the photographs onto the wrong side of photographic paper. As such, the pre-determined pigment sits on the surface of the paper and is pushed around with brushes, thus creating a painting.

What results is a third-person interpretation of the fires. The first-person was the person experiencing the expanse and heat of the fire, photographing the image while zipping in and out of the smoke while in their helicopter. The second person would have made decisions on the composition and cropping of the photograph in their darkroom. Lee, third in line, was however safe from the heat, chaos and fear, re-envisioning the fire in his home studio. And in using this technique he has been highly successful. While staying true to the colours of the photograph Lee infuses an impressionistic overlay through his painterly brushwork. His paintings appear as an artist’s sketch, fresh and spontaneous and this is absolutely appropriate given that the subject matter would require agile artistic speed should one try to paint an inferno from life. And this is where it becomes confusing, even a deception. The paintings read as authentic, a pochade, but of course we know this is charade. What becomes apparent as we learn more about the artistic process is that the rapidly executed painting with their elegant brushwork is in fact several layers removed from the heat and smoke.

Through this technique, the process details are lost and an abstracted image emerges over residual marks of edges and form. The images are aesthetically beautiful and atmospheric with their semi monochromatic palette of oranges, black and grey, a lapse in time to Whistler’s mega-landscape paintings. Their relatively small size is the one glaring critique of Lee’s paintings as the subject matter is grandiose and mythic and deserves to be monumental. As Lee writes “scale should be dictated by the subject [and w]ith landscape of course, it is impossible to replicate anything 1:1. I did try other sizes and it came down to how comfortably I could handle the brushwork and how it appears”.

Lee revisits the notion of the Canadian wilderness and the imagery that is created feels timeless, as representative and relevant now as it would have been a century or even ten centuries ago. The new ghostly images are a reminder of an event and through their remaking assume a more authentic reality in portraying that moment. They transcend the photographic record of an event and become even more real than the original. In Evan Lee’s paintings, you can feel the smoke stinging your eyes, feel the radiating heat and hear the forest imploding through its combustion.

Lee’s Forest Fire series are laden with complex messaging - poignant imagery symbolizing our world in chaos. His paintings point the accusatory finger straight back at the viewer. As a viewer you just need to link one causal effect back to the other and the truth lands squarely onto the collective we. We are in part responsible for BC burning, for Australia burning and for all other places where heat and energy are rampaging the earth.

And the connections of course are that winters aren’t cold enough to kill the bark beetle that in turn reek havoc in conifer stands, which then jump a mountain or two spreading eastward causing more chaos. When fire does strike, the quantity of fibre from the dead and dying trees create a deep burn that spreads widely, instead of giving a nutrient releasing superficial burn that would otherwise rejuvenate forests. All this is coupled with reduced cyclical rainfall and a historic policy of fire suppression. We have created a tinderbox. And looping back to the first causal effect - warmer and drier winters, we do not have to go far to answer why this is occurring.

Lee’s emblematic forest fire series are a re-envisioning and reconstruction of BC’s forests and they cleverly replicate the complex synchronic side step that is playing out on a national and global level by individuals and politicians. Lee’s paintings symbolize our new reality where collectively we are wiping out the complexities and re-articulating our path forward. Through pairing contradictory realities – destruction vs. beauty; authenticity vs. reality; original vs. borrowed; analog vs. digital; handmade vs. mechanically reproduced; and singularity vs. multiplicity, Lee has provided a space for us to engage in an honest discussion.

Vivian Peachey has worked in the field of forest certification for the past 13 years and is a part-time drawing and painting major in her second year at OCADU.

Kim Adams: New Old Works at Diaz Contemporary

By Sarah Bonell
Instructor: Pete Smith

Walking up to Diaz Contemporary, it was quite a surprise to find a familiar piece from this year’s Nuit Blanche parked right outside of the gallery. Kim Adams’s Auto Lamp was displayed on a spinning platform from sunset October 2 to sunrise October 3 at the corner of Queen Street and Yonge Street steps away from the Eaton Centre. The 1996 Dodge Ram van had thousands of punctured holes in a whirling abstract pattern. A powerful light was placed inside the van to illuminate the intricate design and to create elaborate dancing shadows on the surrounding buildings.

The works inside the building were of a similar nature. After walking into the gallery, the viewer is met by two large abstract sculptures comprised of deconstructed car parts taken from a couple Ford Ecoline vans. The wheeled sculpture on the left is mostly built from colourful hoods, doors and windshields with side-view and rear-view mirrors decoratively perched on top. Cocooned in the middle of the sculpture at eye level, visible through the glass are numerous multi-coloured light bulbs. Also on wheels, the sculpture on the right is built from silver parts to form a tall cylinder. The metal tube is perforated similar to the Dodge Ram van and the structure is topped with a peaked metal cap. Love Birds implies a heterosexual couple, compelling the viewer to apply gender to these abstracted, mechanical forms. The left sculpture is portrayed as “female”, which then leads to the question: is she pregnant? Are the colourful lights representative of a new baby safely protected by the strong material surrounding it? This piece is playful and like all of Adams’ works on display here, quite a bit of fun.

Adams is often referred to as a kit-basher – he buys kits to build himself. Clearly he doesn’t read the instructions. Both Love Birds and Auto Lamp are examples of this process replicated with life-size automobiles. Adams has been working with life-size cars for about a decade and has been working with miniature cars for over two decades.

Across the room from the two sculptures are numerous toy cars perforated in a similar style to Auto Lamp. The multi-coloured toy cars are displayed on simple, individual white shelves against a white wall, which really help them stand out. They are all pierced with complex swirling designs. The cars are diverse in their makes: trucks, cars, vans. Although the miniature cars do not have the same initial impact as the life-size car, they are impressive nonetheless. The level of detail put into these small objects is very impressive. All these works are fascinating variations on everyday things, forcing the viewer to reconsider their relationship to these objects. The perforated cars have an interesting sense of fragility about them which seems in conflict with the nature of the car. A car is supposed to be strong and protective, whereas these artworks look more like lace than armour. The life-size perforated cars appear to still be driveable, but they have lost the sense of security automobiles generally have. The reconstructed cars go one step further to alter them so far as to make them unusable. The cars thus become objects purely of aesthetic value and loose all practicality.

Adams’ work causes us to reflect upon our society’s values. When purchasing a car, the buyer does not only think of its use value (getting them from point A to point B), but also its aesthetic and cultural value. Cars are not merely a convenient mode of transportation, but a reflection of the buyer’s wealth and status. Owning a car, as compared to taking public transit, brings some social status, but owning the right car results in a further elevated prestige. Kim Adams’s work pushes these ideas of beauty over practicality further than they occur in life, but remains rooted in a sort of social truth. He has managed to create a beautiful body of work that playfully comments on mass consumerism in our society.

Sarah Bonell is a second year drawing and painting major at the OCAD University.