"Do not ever go into Walmart, Home Depot, Eaton's, The Bay, Rona, Winner's and Home Sense to buy a work of art...Guess what? We have ways of finding out..."
Iain Baxter&
Sunday 1 July 2012
Shary Boyle will represent Canada at the Venice Biennale, 2013
Excerpt from article by Robin Laurence for Straight.com - July 21,'11 ..."Toronto-based Boyle, who started out exhibiting and performing in underground and offbeat venues, is now widely recognized for her provocative, fantastical, horrifying, tender, grotesque, beautiful, and emotionally complex imagery. At the CAG, in a recent public conversation with the artist, the show’s curator, Louise Déry, described Boyle as a nouvelle feminist, whose subjects include childhood, family, sexuality, and heredity.
Whatever her theme and medium, Boyle evokes baroque fictions and fairy tales that are highly personal, but with wider cultural resonance. Her porcelain sculpture Family, for instance, depicts the folkloric cliché of a middle-aged man and woman sitting on the ground, stoking the flames of a small fire. Where the kitsch runs amuck is at the centre of this fire. There sits a stack of human heads—their children—piled up from oldest to youngest in some surrealistic totem pole of primogeniture, or perhaps neurosis. Complete in every intricately fashioned, decorative detail, from the tiny clumps of flowers and grass to the mother’s lace shawl, this miniature tableau reads like a Brothers-Grimm-meet-Salvador-Dali metaphor of love and dysfunction. The flames seem to signal reverence (something to do with impossible expectations), sacrifice (ditto), and destruction (ditto again).
Excerpt from article by Robin Laurence for Straight.com - July 21,'11
ReplyDelete..."Toronto-based Boyle, who started out exhibiting and performing in underground and offbeat venues, is now widely recognized for her provocative, fantastical, horrifying, tender, grotesque, beautiful, and emotionally complex imagery. At the CAG, in a recent public conversation with the artist, the show’s curator, Louise Déry, described Boyle as a nouvelle feminist, whose subjects include childhood, family, sexuality, and heredity.
Whatever her theme and medium, Boyle evokes baroque fictions and fairy tales that are highly personal, but with wider cultural resonance. Her porcelain sculpture Family, for instance, depicts the folkloric cliché of a middle-aged man and woman sitting on the ground, stoking the flames of a small fire. Where the kitsch runs amuck is at the centre of this fire. There sits a stack of human heads—their children—piled up from oldest to youngest in some surrealistic totem pole of primogeniture, or perhaps neurosis. Complete in every intricately fashioned, decorative detail, from the tiny clumps of flowers and grass to the mother’s lace shawl, this miniature tableau reads like a Brothers-Grimm-meet-Salvador-Dali metaphor of love and dysfunction. The flames seem to signal reverence (something to do with impossible expectations), sacrifice (ditto), and destruction (ditto again).