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.