HANDS ON, ARMS OPEN

WORDS BY ABI SLONE

Images from top: The Procession, 2021; The Potter II, 2019; Punch, 2019; Iceberg, 2007; Cephalophoric Saint, 2018; Peacock Spider, 2020; Oasis, 2019; White Elephant, 2021; Outside the Palace of Me, 2021; Fight, 2020. Features image: Red Rope, 2019. (all images courtesy of the artist, Shary Boyle)

Toronto-based artist Shary Boyle has been innovating, creating and shaking shit up since the late ‘90s. The impressive multi-hyphenate (visual artist, performer, writer, activist) held down the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013, has shown around the world, and has launched her biggest show yet (touring throughout Canada) “Outside the Palace of Me” where she brings together her passion for art sights and sounds.

THE CRONING: Thank you so much for chatting with me. And firstly, can we talk about the Venice Biennale 2013, your work, and the wonder that is Vag Halen?
SHARY BOYLE: Well, having Vag Halen (all-female Canadian rock band) in Venice was extraordinary and one of my top favourite things. And I have to say, working with the National Gallery who are traditionally a conventional institution… I always had Vag Halen in my mind and I just had to fight — because of the number of people, it was expensive, but also that [the National Gallery] just didn't know what they were, but I was insistent and it finally happened. Then everybody, of course, as soon as they heard them were like: this is the coolest thing. 

TC: They opened for Lez Zeppelin at the Phoenix a bunch of years ago and Vanessa, the lead vocalist, came out and stood with her back to the audience wearing nylons and a biker jacket and on the back was written DYKE in enormous white letters… I think that I shed some tears. I just was like, you are so rad and incredible. 
SB: Yeah. Yeah. Fearless, fearless, and so skilled and talented at so many things. Right. But what was beautiful for me was that as musicians and artists they are people with really broad backgrounds of all sorts of different experience, coming to see my art. Their response to my work is something I remember most. 

I was just talking to my partner about the illusions or the fantasies one holds as a young inexperienced person... and how the art world can be a really harsh place. 

TC: Do you feel like you wish you still had those illusions?
SB: I can tell you that I sometimes admire people that are kind of in a fantasy world. It is some kind of buffer, or bumper car that you're moving around in and not getting as scraped up. I feel like there's something to be said for that ignorance is bliss thing, because it can feed the energy you need to shake off difficult situations, rejection or the hard things that come along with being an artist in a long career. Because ambition is all about the future, right? 

But that's also a life thing, when you're young. It is all about the future. You're always thinking it's all going to get sorted out. But as you get older the finite nature of life becomes obvious. And then you realize your timeline is actually right there, in front of your eyes. I think that's one of the biggest things with encountering middle-age — everybody's looking at the deck of cards in their hands and going: I am probably not going to be a pro trumpet player in my seventies.

TC: I’m probably not going to be that dancer that I thought I might be. 
SB: Right. You're starting to throw down cards. Whereas when you're younger, you may think ‘And then I can do this, and then maybe I'll be this, and maybe I'll do that.’ 

TC: It could be anything. I had a friend say to me when she was turning 40, ‘I look at it like this for the first 20 years of my life. I basically did nothing. So really I've only been producing for 20 years and I have for sure, at least another 20 in me. So if I think about everything I've learned in the last 20, just think about what I can accomplish in the next 20.’ And I was like, that is a beautiful way to look at it. 
SB: Yeah. Because those first 20 are just experience and trial and error. 

TC: Learning to read… like the basics. 
SB: You know, women have a very distinct process of aging. I wouldn’t divide the genders so much in other categories, but aging, I think is very specific because of the way we've been identified as the procreators. There's the milestone of your fertility ending. And then there's also the notion that we are only as valuable as our desirability. And because our culture is so fundamentally obsessed with beauty in a way that's unconsciously linked with fertility. That stuff impacts us even if we're radical political people. It still can hit you, you know? 

TC: Our bodies go through things that we can't control, it's just ultimately going to happen. So we work it and still create work while at the same time can’t sleep, have a hot flashes and flash rage which you don't quite understand. All of these things are happening and we try to adjust while still making culturally relevant work. 
SB: Another challenge I think people are bored of discussing in the arts is the child question — Am I going to be relevant? If I have children, can I actually have a productive, artistic life? If I'm raising a child, does anybody want to see artwork about me being a parent, or having a child, or about children? Those questions are deep for women. Many men don't have to consider it in the same way. You can have a kind of shadow parenting experience as a man and carry on in your career in a fairly uninterrupted way. And the front facing you doesn't have to acknowledge a partner or children or whatever's going on in the background. Whereas women have a hard time hiding that. In my case, I chose not to have children, much of which had to do with my art really. That's impacted my life, as those kinds of compromises have big effects. But I haven't experienced any menopausal or perimenopausal stuff as yet. I'm almost 49.

TC: I’m 49 as well. It sort of started for me. 
SB: Who knows what it's going to be like… and like, how would I even know? I'm kind of hot. I can't sleep and I'm irritable all the time. So I'm not going to know the difference. 

TC: Have you always been like that, like hot, unable to sleep and slightly irritable? 
SB: Uh, yeah. I've had insomnia on and off for probably a decade. And I'm extremely sensitive to heat. My mother was like this too, so I don't know if we have a vascular thing… I can deal with cold any day. I just can't deal with heat. Irritability is probably related to the lack of sleep, working too much and just being on and off depressed as a character. I've got a good sense of humour though. So that really tempers the whole, and that's helpful for sure.

TC: I was talking to Peaches about the first time I ever saw her perform and she was saying that you were likely doing some, like acetate something… 
SB: Yeah. I think we [Peaches and I] probably first met in the late ‘90s and became pretty fast friends for a few years while she was still in Toronto. It was a really productive time with the people she was living with in the music scene, how it interrelated with film and art. We were all collaborating endlessly and it was totally multi-disciplinary. I mean, there was no money. It wasn't about the commercial scene or being really career minded. We were just on a high of making, subverting, and having a lot of fun. It was really nice. Things have changed obviously in the city. ‘Cause it was still affordable… it was a privilege we could afford to do that. 

TC: Your work has, during different periods and maybe still, been influenced by music.
SB: Still to this day. 

TC: How does that impact the work that you do?
SB: It's actually about the lyrics. I almost never listen to music without lyrics, they are key to me. So it’s something about the way the music and the lyrics operate in my brain, it’s most inspiring and kind of aligned with the way that I think about how art can operate, how I want art to make me feel, and how I might make other people feel. 

I suspect the way I feel about making art has more kinship with how musicians create- than with other artists. I identify more with musicians yet my genre is visual art. I never feel like people quite get my art when they're going to a museum or a gallery. And they're looking at it as visual art where I'm always like, really, you need to feel this like music, but why would they. They're going to a gallery and seeing something in a frame or on a plinth, of course they're going to look at it like art. Those spaces don't necessarily encourage the receptive state that I do when I make it; the process of opening my up my body and emotions in the way that you do when you listen to or make music. It's such a different experiential and narrative journey. 

TC: Have you done shows with your visual art that come with a soundtrack?
SB: Yes. My biggest project to date is happening right now, and it has a soundtrack. I even sourced vintage velvet chairs that were in one of the old Mirvish theatres here in Toronto, to listen to this soundtrack in. Mirvish had just done a major renovation, ripped them all out, classically beautiful old red velvet. I have three on loan for the tour, so people can sit down comfortably in these historical seats. We built a table containing good speakers to face the seats, with a playlist on an iPad that the viewer can scroll through. To pick one of the 75 songs I've selected very specifically, music I was listening to when I made the work they are looking at. Each song defines something about what I'm trying to get at in the exhibition. It's a radically wide soundtrack. From cosmic hip hop to Anne Murray.

TC: You talked about ensuring as much as you could that the people that you brought together were women. How much has that been a part of your practice, or drive, when it comes to collaboration? 
SB: I think who I collaborate with is very, very specific. I'm kind of known as a collaborator so I definitely have had a lot of invitations and it's awkward because really, unless I know you well, and there's a very specific relationship I have with your particular work… it's very intimate. There has to be a huge trust and there has to be kind of a love — the space where sound and vision connect kind of explodes the mind. And I'm super interested in how that works on the audience, as well as myself and the musician. With other visual artists, I am drawn to people I deeply respect, whose hand-made practises I relate to intuitively.

TC: Are there other communities that you’ve made a point or effort to collaborate or work with more recently?
SB: When I first started working with Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona [who lives in Kinngait, Nunavut], her work and mine were very separated in art 'categories'. I credit curator Nancy Campbell, for first putting our work together in the 2009 exhibition “Noise Ghost”. Campbell saw that our artwork had such a sympathetic vibe. When the show came out, it shifted colonial ways of thinking about curating. Viewer's minds were opened. Ashoona's drawings were my favourite of all the contemporary work I was seeing in galleries and museums — it was the art that I'd been looking for. I felt an imagination kinship. 

I then had the opportunity to consider how we might make small gestures of reparation through collaboration. You know, if we make a collective, negotiated creative process, one that's equal. Can we do that? Can we create a visual language that is equal yet sovereign between us? I can use my platform, in contemporary art museums and galleries, to bring other artists who had not been welcomed into that space, where their prices would be higher for their economic benefit. Economics are huge. And that was important for me to consider, as the few Inuit artists that I've worked with up north were not independently managing of their finances… they were involved in a system that was based in a colonial exploitation practice, that hasn't shifted that much.

It can be very complicated. As a white woman I need to be be aware of any 'white saviour' action; the white person that's making the decisions or interventions. Indigenous people must lead their own decision-making around systems and activism- without me being a spokesperson. So though I have a strong compulsion to engage in difficult exchanges around equality, I am also learning to step back and let others lead them. I am always here to support.

TC: It’s interesting to me that there are parts of a gallery at say the National Gallery or the Winnipeg Gallery of Art which I think just opened a whole building exclusively dedicated to showing Indigenous art. The recognition and space I understand, but still feels siloed.
SB: Well, it's interesting because we went from something that was negatively segregated, to the proactive need for sovereignty, where people lead their own stories, by and for themselves. That can in a weird way, replicate a sense of division or category. Our identities can sometimes feel like a silo, without a common platform to learn how to engage as equals. I have sometimes felt like I'm too eager rush into places often where other people aren't ready for me. I have my own work to do. I imagine and hope one day when everyones equality and confidence is entrenched, and there are systems in place that are really making people feel safe, it will be the time for us to come together and figure our collectivity out.

TC: That’s why integration is so key.
SB: It’s why I wanted to make sure, before I agreed to the interview, that you're just not creating a magazine that's full of middle-aged white ladies.

In the ‘90s and early 2000s, I was more conscientious of feminism and gender politics. When we are younger we’re hyper aware of where and who we are. What's impacting us. And intersectionality is something that hopefully, for a lot of us, comes on like a light bulb. Like there's a moment in our evolution and learning and unlearning where we're like, ‘Oh yeah, wait. It's not just me and what I need'.

Another thing as you're getting older- because I've been lucky enough to have some national success in my work- I began to question the rewards of success. Ultimately, spiritually, what is it? What are you going to get out of an endless pursuit of the next level... more productivity, and more money? More approval? What is the evolution you are seeking? After Venice especially, I hit a glass ceiling. If I was going to live in Canada, there's a limit of available opportunities, and that realization changed so much for me. It was a real turning point of, where can I go? It was about platform, and how I might share it. What can I do to make it more meaningful? My choices became about who I'm working with, for, and why I'm working with them. 

TC: That feels a bit like the ethos of The Croning — this idea that collectively we’re going through this thing while still making work and so how can we talk about where we are in our trajectory and how it impacts what we do, whether we want it to or not. Like we also acknowledge that there has been a drive to put women when they hit a certain age into elastic way to waisted pants. And we're not those people — we still drink whiskey, smoke cigarettes, listen to loud music. But the name The Croning, can elicit such a visceral reaction. 
SB: I can't say I love it. But we do need to have more honest, diverse reflection on aging out there. I mean, two things came to mind. My partner's six years younger than me and he's involved with music and you know, of course I've always been involved with music one way or another. And so I'm engaged. But music is often a young person's game, right? You're touring, you're playing bars and festivals. You're desired on stage.

So I'm around a lot of younger people, and it can be hard to always be the oldest person in the room. Because not only am I seen as a mentor, which I love to do and I'm always up for that, but I also miss others that get it immediately. The comfort of being seen as one sees themselves. Resonant references. That's a really hard trick of the mind, because as you say: we are the same curious selves we have always carried. I'm full of fight and energy and I'm always learning… It's just the visuals. My physical casing (and this culture) make people look at me and think I'm something, someone else. And what the youth don't realize is they'll be us in 10 years.

TC: Exactly.

Visit “Outside the Palace of Me” at The Gardiner Museum in Toronto from February 24 until May 15, 2022 and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from September 2022 to January 15, 2023.