Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me

SELF-LED TOURS AVAILABLE FROM 5 APRIL – 8 SEPTEMBER 2024

For more information or to book a tour, please contact: Fiorella Villagaray, Program Assistant
at fvillagaray@mackenzie.art 306-584-4250 ext. 4292

The MacKenzie is inviting groups to lead self-guided tours of the exhibition Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me. Gather your peers, family, friends, co-workers, and community to explore the exhibition from your own unique perspective. These tours are unsupervised and self-led. We look forward to hearing how you make the experience your own. How will you interpret and engage with Shary’s artworks? If you plan on bringing your group to lead a tour, please let us know in advance and we will provide your group with complimentary admission.

Shary Boyle (b. 1972) is from the Scarborough area of Toronto. The recipient of a 2021 Honourary Doctorate of Fine Arts from her alma mater, Boyle graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1994, developing a studio practice centered on figurative drawing, painting, and live performance. Creating deeply imaginative, idiosyncratic, and unsettling worlds, Boyle was an early innovator of live-drawing techniques using overhead projectors referencing shadow puppetry and cell animation. Boyle often collaborated with musicians and artists of other disciplines for these performances, activating her practice with a characteristically inclusive spirit.

Boyle began making sculpture in the late 1990s, modelling small polymer clay figures. Seemingly naïve and otherworldly, these flesh-like works incorporated fantastical imagery and often had an explicitly sexual aspect. She began working with ceramics in 2002, following a workshop on cast porcelain figurines and lace draping, approaches typically associated with elderly hobbyists. Boyle began researching the European history of the porcelain figurine, critically appraising its Enlightenment roots. The resulting works, exhibited at Toronto’s The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in 2006, balanced highly refined and seductive surfaces with startling, sometimes disturbing imagery: a noblewoman holding her own bloody head in her hands, a lady consumed by delicate blossoms, a reclining damsel with an arching ouroboros of heads terminating between her legs.

Shary Boyle continues to work in sculpture, installation, drawing, and performance. Her multidisciplinary artworks were the subject of a major touring exhibition, Shary Boyle: Flesh and Blood in 2010–2011. She represented Canada at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 with Music for Silence, and co-curated the collaborative touring project Earthlings in 2017. Boyle has performed and exhibited extensively, from Los Angeles, New York, Paris, and Icheon, South Korea, to remote communities such as Dawson City, Yukon Territory, and Inuvik, Northwest Territories. Her work is widely represented in private and institutional collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Gardiner Museum.

Commissioned by Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area (CAFKA), Shary Boyle’s work White Elephant is featured in Outside the Palace of Me.

Please enjoy, a virtual tour of White Elephant and ‘In The Studio’ by Terry O’Neill and Tara Cooper; a short film capturing an intimate look behind the scenes of this work’s creation. White Elephant is a 9-foot tall, oversized, elongated, disproportionate seated figure all in white, with a head that features kinetic movement that rotates at irregular intervals. This gigantic sculpture is constructed with structural steel and shaped with foam, dressed in a custom hand-knitted sweater, bespoke trousers, sourced dress shoes and a wig. The hands and face are rendered in porcelain.