SHARY BOYLE at Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery

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"Virus (White Wedding)"

Shary Boyle, "Virus (White Wedding)," plaster, lace, timer-sequenced overhead projector, fan, acetate, ink, 2009, 60" X 60" X 48". PHOTO: DAVID JACQUES.

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"Burden I"

Shary Boyle, "Burden I," porcelain, china paint, lustre, 2010, 12" x 14" x 14". PHOTO: RAFAEL GOLDCHAIN.

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"Live Old"

Shary Boyle, "Live Old," porcelain, china paint, lustre, beads, 2010, 9" x 10" x 8.5". PHOTO: RAFAEL GOLDCHAIN.

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"Flesh and Blood"

Shary Boyle, "Flesh and Blood," installation view, Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010. PHOTO: RAFAEL GOLDCHAIN.

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"King Cobra"

Shary Boyle, "King Cobra," Porcelain, China Paint, Lustre, 2010, 11" X 14" X 10". PHOTO: RAFAEL GOLDCHAIN.

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"Virus (White Wedding)"

Shary Boyle, "Virus (White Wedding)," plaster, lace, timer-sequenced overhead projector, fan, acetate, ink, 2009, 60" X 60" X 48". PHOTO: DAVID JACQUES.

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SHARY BOYLE AT VANCOUVER'S CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY

In flesh and blood, at Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery, Shary Boyle builds a delicate, visceral world.

BY: Amy Fung

Fueled by her own unstoppable imagination, Shary Boyle’s work shatters life into visually stunning narrative shards, breaking down hierarchies between humans and animals, men and women, and transforming the figurative genre into a form that eerily looks back at its viewers.

For 20 years, Boyle’s work has eluded being categorized into any one medium or genre. Long heralded as an outsider in terms of her non-referential, anti-institutional methods, Boyle is now coming off a landmark year — and she shows no signs of slowing down. She took home the 2009 Gershon Iskowitz Prize, which came with a $25,000 award and a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The highly lauded Flesh and Blood was curated by Louise Dery of the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal, where the show ran earlier this year. This summer, Flesh and Bloodtravels to Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.

While future projects include a 2012 live presentation for children in Toronto, Boyle’s work has long been aptly described as “intense”. Little has been said about the root of that intensity, an energy that is dark, yet highly imaginative, if not joyfully absurd. Her work boils down to a highly attuned and perceptive sensitivity to the state of being alive, and inherent in each piece is an innate curiosity that emerges from a sense of being different.

As an artist, she doesn’t hold back in expressing a sensuality and honesty rarely visible on the surface of contemporary art. From wistful drawings of strange and vulnerable young women to haunting porcelain sculptures sprung directly from a wild imagination, Boyle intervenes into the arc of art history with a potentially polarizing feminist narrative.

In January, Boyle was invited to present her work as part of Sculptural Vocabularies, Canada’s first conference focusing on women working in three-dimensional forms. Held in Winnipeg as a partnership between The Winnipeg Art Gallery and Mentoring Art for Women Artists, Sculptural Vocabulariesbrought Boyle together with artists including Jennifer Stillwell, Catherine Widgery, Yolanda Paulsen, and many more. Boyle shared a panel with Aganetha Dyck, whose work, from its co-opting of the classic porcelain figurine, to its startling manipulation of organic forms, runs an uneven parallel with her own.

Dyck is the well-loved Winnipeg-based sculptor and multi-media artist who for years has been collaborating with honey bees in her apiary-influenced art practice, which plays with issues of domesticity and heritage. Dyck was enthusiastic about Boyle’s work throughout the presentation, and spoke afterward of her appreciation for Boyle’s labour-intensive methods.

While the two artists are formally quite distinct and represent different generations, they share a common sense of humble rebellion, and Dyck certainly recognized this thread. “I think Shary Boyle’s work is incredibly strong, full of vibrancy, integrity and fascination,” she says. “I think her imagination varies from the rest of us, since it appears to flow from her very being — as if there is not an ounce of separation between her thinking and her work.”

Boyle is unnervingly connected to the emotional soul of her work, unflinchingly in a manner that does not drown in the detail of joys and misery. “I honestly do my work for very personal reasons,” she says. “I do it to try and process often very difficult feelings that I have about being alive, and so this work gives me an outlet to make a story about it and make an image about it. It’s about basic expression, but also through the expression I am making something hopefully transformative, exquisite even, so it lends more value and worth to an experience that sometimes you resent.”

As an artist who has long worked with the figure, Boyle has largely been operating outside of the self-referential system of art history. From visual art to live collaborative performances with musician Christine Fellows, Boyle produces images and characters that seem to emanate directly out of her frontal lobes. Flesh and Blood includes the workVirus (White Wedding), which positions a life-size alabaster figure ignited by a timer-sequenced overhead projector, throwing onto the figure a startling, dissonant, almost nightmarish cast.

Channeling the rawness of her feelings, dreams, and experiences, and her innate sense of isolation, which she’s carried in some form since childhood, Boyle has been creating a mythology of society’s outcasts, splaying open the conflicts and conundrums in all of life’s desires and disappointments.

She cites Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as one of her favourite novels, and a highly influential text. “I think I have this essential sympathy for the outsider, or that feeling of isolation or rejection or imperfection. So many of my figures are in the position of being an outsider, and there is this misunderstanding of the essential injustice in that position. I want to make people look at the painful things inside themselves, and recognize the humanity in any kind of position, and the mirroring of their own flaws and faults.”

Boyle feels empathy for both Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. “That story means so much to me because of the monster and because of his essential and endless disenfranchised position,” she says with an emphasis that is more observant than protective. “He will never be loved. He will never be a real person, and that breaks my heart so much. His whole life he is reviled even though he is constantly trying to reach out. He gets rejected, and then that pushes him into anger and frustration. It’s such an essential and cruel part of life. In the end, when they’re just chasing each other through the Arctic, it’s the most heart-wrenching. It’s just so huge and human, the emptiness, the isolation, chasing your creator and your creation, and never connecting. There are just so many great metaphors there.”

Boyle has had the greatest commercial success so far with her original porcelain works. As a medium, they perfectly embody her duality of vulnerability and intensity. She learned the art of porcelain figurine-making from hobbyists and enthusiasts, and respectfully engages with the form’s myriad social histories (as collectibles, decorative art, representations of commercial status) and ultimately twisting them. Though she left art school after less than a year, and has never located herself with a recognizable art lineage, she seems to be making her own sense of history.

In Flesh and Blood, each original figurine sits in vitrine-enclosed display as one in a series of islands, each alone to be contemplated. For her, it’s similar to the way that people create their own myths around themselves, building individual islands of self-regard and fantasy.

“Self-mythology implies a grander story than one that actually exists, but I think we need it, because life can be just so banal and a bummer and there are just so many things that are so mediocre,” she says lighting up. “I want to feel that life is more fantastical, but we’re living in an age when imagination is in the service of consumerism and commodity.”

She loves stories like Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, with its surrealism and enchantment, all created in the limited technical capacity of the 1940s film world. “The innovation of the technique is so delightful, because it comes from human minds with very few material means at hand,” she says. “They’re so ingenious. It’s so heartening to know people are capable of these wonderful leaps of imagination. It makes life so exciting and magical and makes me think humans aren’t so bad after all if they can do this. It’s redemptive.”

The Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver will host Shary Boyle’s Flesh and Blood from June 17 to August 21, 2011.