Shary Boyle

Theatrical exhibition tackles the trauma, anxiety and hybridity of contemporary life.

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Toronto artist Shary Boyle’s exhibition, Outside the Palace of Me, ultimately suggests history is an odd place for the human persona to be. While truth is always there, it seems less easy to hammer down or contain, for ultimately it is as ephemeral in its universal significance as our own lives.  

Boyle’s nationally touring show, on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until Jan. 15, is arranged like a theatre, complete with a dressing room, a chorus, a stage and a backstage, with all the requisite exits. 

The exhibition’s next iteration, at the Vancouver Art Gallery from March 4 to June 4, will include the same works seen at other venues, including Boyle’s interactive sculpture, drawings and porcelain. 

Boyle, who represented Canada at the 2013 Venice Biennale, has reinvented the medium of porcelain for the 21st century. Merging identity politics, slapstick and a near-Victorian imaginative sensibility, she explores with bravado and shameless curiosity what we share despite our differences. 

The show’s title is a fragment of text from British writer Kae Tempest’s 2017 song, Europe Is Lost. Boyle’s work reflects the trauma, anxiety and hybridity of our contemporary human drama. Ultimately, she builds on what the self and the other are – or could be. The extravagance, the costumes and the bodies build into a multi-tiered, many-scaled theatrical set that we enter and read visually as we move through it.

Boyle’s art engages interactivity in various ways. Her White Elephant is a nine-foot steel and foam sculpture of an all-white woman with ceramic hands and face. A mechanism causes the head to turn intermittently a full 360 degrees. With this and other works, Boyle is trying to tell a story about the white supremacism inherent to colonial settler history, aware of how hard it is for some to understand their “white” legacy. Unspoken privilege and racism go hand in hand, her creative engagement seems to suggest.

One hieratic figure, The Potter II, is purely eclectic, a composite whose vertical assemblage of cultural porcelain and pottery engages us with its relativistic look at the hybrid complexity of the world. Judy is a post-pandemic, post-Disney figure from a puppeteer’s circus. Another work, The Sculptor, shows a headless artist creating a beak-nosed human head. The exchange between the head and the headless body is a powerful play on the creative process. 

In many of these works, the boundaries between inner identity and outer-world persona merge, falter and reinvent themselves. It’s a cornucopia worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, but one more positive in its global message. We are, indeed, learning to accept multiplicity and intercultural complexity.

Similarly, on the wall we see fairy tale-like works with mischievous twists. In Settler, a pregnant woman with a bonnet and long braids perches on a Western-style pioneer wagon. A man’s arm reaches out to her from inside the wagon as she is smoking a puff of … something. These are tropes worn by time, now hybridized and lifted into the 21st century. 

In Scarborough, a Pinocchio-type character walks with a stick on one shoulder, upon which a bird is perched. The figure’s body and clothes are a monochrome brown, but the head is white. Characters from lost mythologies wander into an uncertain future, echoing figures from childhood fantasies. The youth depicted in Lone Gunman (White Man) has the quality of a storybook character, yet the drawing is also a powerful comment on militarism, violence and the myth of freedom that propels the worst aspects of individualism. This child will murder – or could be murdered.

Neo-Victorian twists of the imagination can be seen throughout Boyle’s encompassing exhibition. Her art is full of empathy and collective creative engagement that is little burdened by stylistic turns or historical vices and virtues. Above all, she raises vital questions: Are we funny? Who are we? What am I? ■

Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from Sept. 1, 2022, to Jan. 15, 2023, and the Vancouver Art Gallery from March 4, 2023, to June 4, 2023. The exhibition was organized by Sequoia Miller, chief curator the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, where it was exhibited from Feb. 24, 2022, to May, 15 2022.

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Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

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