Shary Boyle: National Treasure, Too
Shary Boyle Canadian Artist 2012 Installation view / photo Toni Hafkenscheid
It all began with an invitation—a thick, heavy, gold-embossed missive that thudded into mailboxes last month advertising Shary Boyle’s installation Canadian Artist at the BMO Project Room in Toronto.
More than spelling out event details, it laid down a gauntlet—and maybe a gag or two.
“A really ostentatious invite that you can crack over your leg… When have you ever seen that in Canada?” asks Boyle over a cup of coffee in her Toronto studio. “And when have you ever seen something like that with the words ‘Canadian Artist’ on it?”
The answer, for this writer: never. Upon opening the invitation, I had laughed with surprise.
“It’s a joke,” Boyle says. “You look at the Serpentine or Gagosian or whatever—they always have those kinds of invitations. It’s about the status related to that cultural site.”
“The things that are made in our country don’t have that same status. They can be as important, interesting and skilled as anything happening in New York or Berlin or London, but … they aren’t lent that status. So I’m just putting forward a precedent.”
Boyle’s installation for Canadian Artist—also intended to be precedent setting—consists of an imaginary family tree (or, as she writes in an exhibition text, a “preposterous, yet semi-logical, system of ancestry”) for its titular character. It stretches back five generations, to approximately 1850. The ancestors’ faces, 44 in all, are presented as pale, unpainted chalkware reliefs edged discreetly with gold; only the artist’s porcelain visage is decorated with glazes. Straight, minimal lines of ribbon link the array in the space, while a related website (canadian-artist.ca) provides background material on each ancestor.
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Shary Boyle Canadian Artist 2012 Installation view / photo Toni Hafkenscheid |
Although Boyle, in conversation, denies the notion that Canadian Artist operates as a self-portrait, the project’s website indicates that part of the impetus for the work were the blank stares that followed her international introductions as a “Canadian artist,” as well as her feeling of “total identity freedom” as a third-generation Canadian. The website also describes how some of the ancestor characters were inspired by Boyle’s personal experiences, like the Sami Whaler who references a trip to Norway in 2007. (Some of the other ancestor characters will already seem familiar to fans of Boyle’s past work, like the Hypertrichosis Mystic Raised by Wolves, Siberia, which recalls the hairy figures of her 2007 painting The Beast and 2006 sculpture La Bête.)
Interestingly, during my visit to the installation (on view by appointment to November 30), I found Canadian Artist far more subtle, spare and subdued than its advertising might have suggested. Also, when compared with Boyle’s more forceful articulations on geographic identity (like a much-blogged Walrus item this fall) and with her visceral, visually seductive past works (as seen in the recent touring show “Flesh & Blood”), Canadian Artist seemed to me somewhat elliptical, or even obtuse.
“I feel like this one’s a bit of a creeper,” Boyle says when I ask her about this, appending that it seems “weird” to say so. “I feel that it’s going to have a lot of extra resonance in 15 or 20 years, or even further. There is stuff going on in this that’s going to make more sense as years go by.”
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Shary Boyle Canadian Artist 2012 Installation view / photo Toni Hafkenscheid |
What lushness and richness does exist in the piece seems to dwell in the potential narrative connections between its characters, which reveal a surprisingly convincing fairytale logic. A German journeyman and a Chinese silkworm farmer give rise to a Tibetan opium farmer; an Ainu fisherman and a Japanese mermaid give rise to a Mongolian Hydrophobic Shepherd; and a Peruvian slave raider and an Easter Island sculptor give rise to a Hawaiian surfer. (A note: This sense of connectivity came through best for me when viewing the work in person, when the entire tree could be navigated with quick glances, rather than multiple online click-throughs.)
“Every one of those pairs was considered,” Boyle says. “How would they get there? How would they meet each other? What would their relationship be if they met each other? How would their child go from where they are to the next place?” She says she was constantly looking at a map, as well as researching mobility and immigration patterns.
Yet there’s also a thorny, uncomfortable and potentially problematic side to the connections Boyle has drawn up—namely, the fact that they often match oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized. Rapist, Hudson Bay Company Man, Scotland mates with Foundling, Catholic Nunnery, Wales. Sadistic Murderer, Perfumer, France is paired with Amateur Inventor, Prostitute, New Orleans.
“It was important for me to do a historical project where I incorporated all of the spectrum of possible people and lifestyles—and, absolutely, the oppressed and the powerful,” Boyle says when I ask her about this aspect. She notes the work was conceived at the same time as The Clearances, a 2007 installation “dealing with those same issues of the oppressed and colonization.” (The Clearances is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.) Boyle also argues that the inclusive emotional tenor of her past work—which embraces positive and negative, joyful and tragic, usually in personal or psychic terms—is simply writ large here to world history.
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Shary Boyle Canadian Artist 2012 Installation view / photo Toni Hafkenscheid |
On a somewhat related front when viewing the installation, I wondered how Boyle considered members of Canada’s First Nations in making the work. After all, part of the impetus for Canadian Artist, as described on its website and exhibition text, was Boyle’s personal feeling of rootlessness—a feeling which likely does not apply to many First Nations artists, who have deep roots in this land. Also, Canadian Artist’s characters do include aboriginals—like Inuit Ijiraat, Baffin Island, and Seminole Healer, Florida—while the sculpture for its contemporary artist character seems to integrate elements of historical Haida maskmaking, like pieces of long, dark human hair.
That First Nations mask reference for the Canadian Artist character was intentional, Boyle says, with the face’s woodgrain-glaze pattern “lifted directly from a Germanic porcelain tradition” and integrated with other elements “that had nothing to do with European tradition, so it was a combination of those two things.” She had hoped that face would also be androgynous (a complete hybrid) and says that overall she tried to generate “a careful balance of not claiming somebody else’s story or experience, but also wanting to make sure that people are represented.”
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Shary Boyle Canadian Artist 2012 Installation view / photo Toni Hafkenscheid |
Conversations like this one aside, Canadian Artist is far from the forefront of Boyle’s mind these days. When I visited her studio, she and an assistant were heavily in production of props for Everything Under the Moon, her February performance collaboration with Christine Fellows at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. Sketches also loomed on the wall for her installation at Mass MoCA’s “Oh, Canada” survey, which opens in May.
Part of me wondered how much all this activity had to do with the sparse nature of Boyle’s show at the BMO Project Room. But she remained resolute in her conviction that the show is complete, and will yield longstanding fruit.
“I want to set a precedent with illustrating and animating my own mythology around being Canadian, around being an artist, that has a kind of presence that isn’t seen or expected elsewhere,” she says.
“Hopefully, I’ve just, if not brought it to a new place, then at least put it in a public place or opened that up as something to continue speaking about.”
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Shary Boyle Canadian Artist 2012 Installation view / photo Toni Hafkenscheid |
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