When Calgary’s Esker Foundation art gallery invited renowned Toronto contemporary artist Shary Boyle to exhibit in their space, she took the opportunity to give exposure to six lesser known artists from Nunavut.
“I started to think about what work had the most meaning for me personally as an artist and an individual, what work I liked the most in Canada and what work would be really forwarding an openness to what I imagine contemporary art is,” Boyle said. “So instead of going towards people that were already established in contemporary art, I wanted to open those boundaries.”
Boyle considered a variety of artists before deciding on featuring friend and past collaborator Shuvinai Ashoona from Cape Dorset, as well as Jessie Kenalogak of Baker Lake and Rankin Inlet’s Roger Aksadjuak, Pierre Aupilardjuk, John Kurok and Leo Napayok.
“Because I work with ceramics and I had just found out about these really extraordinary ceramic artists in Rankin Inlet I wanted to include their work because it hasn’t been seen much at all. Very few people know about it,” she said.
The exhibition, Earthlings, opened in Calgary in early 2017. From there a condensed version exhibited in Toronto and Montreal before coming to the Nanaimo Art Gallery to displayed for the last time this summer.
Two days before those pieces are all packed up and returned to the collections to which they belong, Boyle is coming to VIU to discuss the origins of Earthlings and how it came together.
Boyle, Aupilardjuk and Kurok created some of the pieces in the show at a residency in Medicine Hat, Alta. Boyle said the Nunavut sculptors come from a collaborative tradition where pieces of art are passed around a table and each sculptor adds their own touch.
“It wasn’t about the individual ego of the artist, but more about the collective sharing of the experience, [which] was really, really appealing and interesting to me,” Boyle said.
Once the friendship and comfort was there, the residency became collaborative as well. Boyle said passing her work to others was an exercise in surrendering control and a gesture of trust between people.
“The overarching politics of that specifically for me as a white colonial settler person in Canada is really key to devise a different way to have an exchange and communicate with Indigenous people,” she said. “This is a small project. It’s just a gesture. It’s art, right? I really believe in the social power of art but I know it’s not front-line activism and it’s not policy change but it’s a way to role model a different potential exchange.”
Boyle said she feels that Earthlings was “an incredible success.” That what she and her fellow artists presented was imaginative and new and different from a “typical” contemporary art show. She said it’s something people have an appetite for.
“A seed that I hope was planted with this exhibition was that one day there won’t be silos between us in the realm that I’m operating in, which is contemporary art,” Boyle said. “That instead of having an Indigenous exhibition, or an area in the museum that was specific to Indigenous, that we would, regardless of cultural background, be presented in equality on the same stages but with our cultural distinctions in tact.”
WHAT’S ON … Toronto artist Shary Boyle appears at Vancouver Island University, Building 355 Room 203, on Thursday, Oct. 4 at 7 p.m.
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