The people and creatures depicted in the sculptures in the exhibition “Earthlings” feel like dreams.
In the exhibition, on view at Galerie de l’UQAM at the Université du Québec at Montréal through April 14, two trees get up and fight. A man holds a bird (a goose maybe) as his chest sprouts a whole community of faces. A woman with a hole where her face should be holds a mask-like face in her hand. The fur of a muskox sprouts men and boats. A hand becomes a strange crawling creature as it grows a woman’s head and long, pointed fingernails. The fingers of another hand bend painfully back the wrong way.
“I think of this work, my own included, as ‘bridge art’; it spans between things, between people, animals, space, and the earth,” Toronto artist Shary Boyle has said of the show, which includes individual and collaborative works by her and six Inuit artists. “It spans languages. It spans the real and the unreal. The living and the dead. The past and the future. It is art to communicate, through symbols, myths, dreams, and hybrids. It connects.”
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In addition to Boyle, who represented Canada in the 2013 Venice Biennale, the lineup includes the late artist Roger Aksadjuak of Kangiqtiniq (Rankin Inlet); Shuvinai Ashoona of Kinngait (Cape Dorset); Pierre Aupilardjuk of Kangiqtiniq (Rankin Inlet); Jessie Kenalogak in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake); John Kurok of Kangiqtiniq (Rankin Inlet); and Leo Napayok from Salliq (Coral Harbour) and Kangiqtiniq (Rankin Inlet).
Boyle’s art is populated by haunted visions of spider-women, new moms, lovers, snakes, monsters, mermaids, families, dead bodies. The collaborations and pairings here spark as her approach echoes and rhymes with the Inuit artists’ efforts, contemporary art rooted in traditions of the Canadian North. It’s an exhibition of earth and magic, uncanny transformations, and elemental and psychological charges.
Boyle and Ashoona began making collaborative drawings in 2011 after their art was exhibited together. This partnership prompted additional connections that eventually led Boyle to collaborate in 2016 with ceramicists Pierre Aupilardjuk and John Kurok at Medalta, a ceramics production and exhibition center in Medicine Hat.
“It’s really satisfying to make things together because we come from different cultural backgrounds,” Boyle tells me. (She describes her own background as “colonial settler Irish white Canadian.”) “Mostly, it’s just learning to let go of control and authorship. The art world is all about individual genius. So the ego gets stripped down a bit and that feels great.”
When Boyle was invited to have a show at the Esker Foundation in Calgary, she thought to include the whole group. The resulting exhibit has been touring Canada since it debuted at the Esker Foundation in early 2017. She says, “This is also on a different level for me an opportunity to make a small gesture toward equality in terms of platform accessibility and opportunity.”
“This is not an Inuit Art show, nor is it a Contemporary Art exhibition,” Boyle writes in the catalog. “Our cultural distinctions are intrinsic, but our sincere love for, and belief in, the stories we express is cosmic and universal. With ‘Earthlings,’ I hope to invigorate the possibility of art inspiring wonder, challenging complacency, awakening hope and activating empathy.”
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