Shary Boyle
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Untitled 11, 2007
Oil on board
| Beast, 2007 Oil on panel
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Black Mushrooms, 2008 Flourescent polymar clay, beads, ink.
| Untitled (Bat series), 2008 Porcelain, glaze.
| Performance, 2006 Boyle performing Shadow Songs: live projections with Christine Fellows.
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Bat 4, 2008 Porcelain, unique
| Wicked Witch of the East, 2009 Porcelain, unique (detail_
| Lovers, 2009 Porcelain, unique
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Our Ancestors' Concern, 2009 Chalk pastel on paper
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Shary Boyle currently lives and works in Toronto, though her career has involved travel and residencies in several European countries. She is well-known for her bold, fantastical explorations of the figure. Highly crafted and deeply imaginative, her multi-disciplinary practice mines the history of porcelain figurines, animist mythologies and historical portraiture to create a symbolic language uniquely her own. From sculpture to performance Boyle interprets her personal observations of sexuality, relationships and human vulnerability through a darkly feminist lens. She is the winner of the 2009 Iskowitz Award and her work is exhibited and collected internationally.
Boyle also collaborates with musicians, creating "live" drawings, which are animated and projected onstage during their performances. She has worked with Peaches at the Sonic Youth-curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Los Angeles and performed in 2005 with Feist at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris. In 2007 Boyle was invited to perform a new work as the opening act for Will Oldham's California tour. She and Doug Paisley performed Dark Hand and Lamplight at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in Spring 2008 as a component of the program for the Kara Walker exhibition and were invited to present this work again at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Next Wave series in November 2008.
In celebration of the museum's reopening in the new Frank Gehry building in 2008, the Art Gallery of Ontario commissioned two works by Boyle which respond to Italian baroque works in the collection. She will comlete a major commission for the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2012.
Shary Boyle's work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions including at the Power Plant, Toronto in 2006, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbrdge) in 2008 and in 2010-2011 the major exhibition Flesh and Blood will be seen at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the Galerie de L'UQAM, Montreal and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.
Otherworld Uprising, a comprehensive book on Shary Boyle’s art was published by Conundrum Press, Montreal in association with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. The Galerie de L'UQAM will publish a comprehensive catalogue of the exhibition Flesh and Blood in late 2010.
Exhibitions
Fantasia: Barrow, Boyle, Duke & Battersby
Shary Boyle: Wonderlust
SILENCE, LIMITED
SHARY BOYLE: THE CAVE