Earthlings unite
In their shared exhibit, Shary Boyle, Inuit artists find a deep communion despite their differences
As a holdover fragment of 1950s sci-fi kitsch, “earthling” seems a benign enough term or at least one of uncomplicated convenience: a single rubric under which all we terrestrially bound types might be herded for a pragmatic alien needing a catch-all.
The world’s a big place, though, and often the ground beneath our feet seems to be the only thing we sevenplus-billion share. That’s just one of the things that makes Earthlings, a transporting, startlingly gorgeous display of drawings and ceramics mostly from the country’s far north, a gesture of defiant optimism from the get-go.
Curated by Shary Boyle, who’s also among the seven artists displayed here, the show’s title is far from one of convenience and undeniably one of hope: that across the endless tangents of time, space and culture, there are still those points where we intersect and where communion can occur.
At first glance, Earthlings plots those points across common ways of making. Boyle, whose roots are in the relatively warmer climes of Scarborough, stands on equal footing with six Inuit artists: Roger Aksadjuak, Pierre Aupilardjuk, Jessie Kenalogak, John Kurok, Leo Napayok and Shuvinai Ashoona, with whom Boyle has had a long and fruitful alliance (since 2011, the pair have been making collaborative drawings that trek between Toronto and Cape Dorset, where Ashoona lives). But quickly, Earthlings shifts to deeper points of spiritual union. Divergent styles find kinship in a shared embrace of visceral fantasia and a commitment to a sensual world.
This is a realm brimming with story and myth: Kurok and Napayok’s Man Holding Bird writhes with a tangle of creatures seeming to emerge from its own skin, while nearby Boyle’s Siren, a wide-eyed bust, is riven by rainbows and choked by enveloping braids.
Taken as a whole, the show, awash in eerie light, has a mystical, otherworldly sense, as though you’ve happened upon the trophy chamber of some primeval pagan god. The truth is much less dramatic, but the flight of imagination the scene triggers is precisely the contact high that Boyle and co-curator Shauna Thompson mean to provoke.
It’s how Earthlings remains true to its source. In 2009, Boyle was invited by the Toronto curator Nancy Campbell to be half of a two-woman show at the University of Toronto. She didn’t know the other artist, beyond her name; but what she found, arriving in the gallery to hang her works, was an unimagined kinship. Her other half was Ashoona, one of a community of Cape Dorset, Nunavut-based Inuit artists making inroads into the southern art consciousness, and her works embraced the same epic sweep of the imagination to which Boyle had long since committed.
Hers was a sensual world, of bodies and monsters braided through the trials of the everyday, of creatures and worlds inflecting mundane human life with a charge of dark magic. “When an artist is deeply lost in their work and it’s going very well, they fly,” Boyle wrote, looking back at that moment, in Canadian Art magazine in 2015. “These drawings were high as a kite. I had never seen anything like them and I immediately felt: This is home. This is the shared home of imagination.”
If that moment didn’t lead directly to Earthlings, it’s surely the spool from which the thread was drawn. Boyle, energized by Ashoona’s glorious melding of myth, fantasy and the workaday, travelled to Cape Dorset to meet her for the first time in 2011. Through their shared concerns, they found common ground; working to- gether in the studio there, they produced their first collaborative work that year, Universal Cobra Pussy. (Ashoona offered the title and Boyle heartily agreed).
Not long after, Boyle was chosen to represent Canada at the 2013 Venice Biennale, a task that would consume her life for the next 18 months. In the aftermath, the weight of being alone in its spotlight had left her feeling depleted and craving both connection and a creative communion.
She circled back to Ashoona, hoping to pick up where they left off, with a proposition meant to deepen their exchange. Ashoona accepted and their collaboration took on a renewed vigour. The pair exchanged drawings, north to south, with one finishing what the other had started. The results became their second two-person show in 2015, built on the kinship of the imagination and the making of things.
Through it, Boyle began to experience an epiphany. Despite her acclaim, Boyle had always felt like an outlier in the contemporary art world, her deep embrace of fantasy and raw emotion finding little kinship with the dry rigour that had long been its priority.
But with Ashoona, far from everything she thought she knew, she felt deeply connected. “It was really something to reckon with: Why do we have such harmony when our life experiences are so different?” Boyle said. The realization was clarifying: that the divisions were artificial and their shared language of the imagination was the bridge that would span it.
Not long after, Boyle and Ashoona, by now close colleagues, had planned to work together again. In 2015, on another trip to Cape Dorset, Boyle had a chance encounter with Stephen Borys, the director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Boyle had just been to Matchbox Gallery, an Inuit art collective in Rankin Inlet, on the western shore of Hudson’s Bay. On his phone, he showed her photos of ceramic works he had seen there.
Seeing them, Boyle felt that familiar sensation of soaring. She had been making ceramic pieces for years, and had delved deep across ages and continents in her research. But she had never seen anything like it: charredlooking works, black and brown, as though rescued from a fire; figures half-human, half-seal, swimming in arcs around a central vessel; a man’s head enveloped by the sagging form of a goose. “As soon I saw that work I thought, ‘Oh God, I need to get there and meet these artists,’ ” she said.
Things were evolving, and quickly. She and Ashoona had agreed to pro- duce another show together. Boyle had been invited to do a residency later that year at Medalta, a storied ceramics facility in Medicine Hat, and the Esker Foundation, a private museum in Calgary, had already booked a solo exhibition with her for 2017.
Suddenly, everything became clear. She would invite Ashoona and the Matchbox artists to join her at Esker, she decided, and the Medalta residency would be a chance to forge a connection. “It was like a cosmic convergence,” Boyle said. “And I just thought, ‘This is what we have to do.’ ”
A handful of collaborative pieces here speak of their deep communion. In a piece by Aupilardjuk, a small figure holding a seal oil lamp seems to grow from the wrist of a distinctly Boyle-like hand; Sugluk, after the cult legend Inuit garage rock band of the same name, is a joint effort between Kurok and Boyle, of a spindly fingered open palm with a seal emerging from the wrist, faces growing at its fingertips.
But one more than any other converges sensibilities and brings Earthlings closest to the cosmic communion at which it aims. It’s called Face Forward, a seated, distinctly Boyleian figure, with its stick-like limbs poking out from a sack dress of brightly coloured herringbones. On its shoulders and where its hands should be are heads, serene and wide-eyed, with that distinct smokefired surface, like things found at the ends of the Earth.
It’s a joint effort between Boyle and Aupilardjuk, a collision of assumed opposites that nonetheless mesh in revealing harmony. It is the icon at Earthlings’ spiritual core.
“There’s something universal about making works like these,” Boyle says. “It’s powerful; I don’t believe there’s anybody in the world who could see it and not be affected by it. It’s only when you apply labels that things get reduced and divided.” Earthlings continues at the Doris McCarthy Gallery at U of T’s Scarborough campus, 1265 Military Trail, until Jan. 27. Barrel-firing workshops with Boyle and Aupilardjuk will take place Jan. 13, 27 and 28. See utsc.utoronto.ca.