Shary Boyle
Shary Boyle’s drawing, sculpture and performance considers the social history of ceramic figures, animist mythologies and folk-art forms to create a symbolic, feminist and politically charged language uniquely her own.
Boyle activates her practise through collaboration and mentorship, engaging other creative communities and disciplines with a characteristically inclusive spirit.
Her solo touring exhibition Outside the Palace of Me, organized by Toronto’s Gardiner Museum, was presented by The Rooms in Newfoundland in 2021, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2022, the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2023, and opens at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC this September.
Toronto, Ontario/Sackville, New Brunswick
The Trampled Devil
Featuring handmade costumes, masks and analogue overhead projection animations, The Trampled Devil presents a metamorphosing multiplicity of selves to reimagine the absent wooden body of the Archangel. Dizzying character transitions and a super-dynamic soundtrack pull the viewer into a tender, ecstatic and harrowing ritual, confronting our own moral masquerades.
Shot in an experimental vertical format with the artist's shoes literally nailed to the floor, the original silent video was made to be projected at the Devil Museum, above the actual sculpture that shares its name.
An archetypal cast of characters – the White Witch, Bat, Devil, Crone and “Warbanks,” a global financier who looks suspiciously like Andy Warhol – shape-shift through negotiation, compromise and transformative exchange: trading hope and transmitting threat between them. Identity slips as morality slides. Violence begets grief, but experience offers the choice of wisdom. Will the Archangel claim it?
A rooted trip of handmade aesthetics and analogue animations, The Trampled Devil embodies the moral complexities and compromises of our lived experience.