By Ryan Bigge
“Could I write a piece about you now that you’ve made it? About the hours spent, the wilderness in your training.”
– Belle and Sebastian, “The Stars of Track And Field”
I’m not quite sure Shary Boyle wants to be on the cover. Yes, she agreed to be photographed and interviewed, but ultimately, I think she would prefer to let her art communicate unfiltered. This hesitation doesn’t seem to stem from an inability to expound upon her work — quite the opposite — Shary is very articulate. Shy at first, slightly twinged with an artist-awkward persona, this surface impression evaporates when she starts talking passionately about her art, her goals and her work. What she is most concerned with right now, is success. As she puts it, “I have a certain amount of skepticism about popularity. I could just as easily not be cool tomorrow.”
For Shary, popularity, even the modest variety that Broken Pencil might provide, is not to be immediately and uncritically embraced, but puzzled over carefully. Rather than ignore or succumb to our 60 watt spotlight, Shary has chosen to subvert it. Her compromise took the form of submitting photos of herself she had “enhanced” with a felt tip pen — fake glasses, fake moustaches, weird squiggles at once highlighting and mocking the very notion of the artist as celebrity.
Shary’s uncertainties aside, her art is certainly cover-worthy. Randomly flip throughHomestead, Scarborough (the 1998 bookwork/zine that initiated me into Shary’s world) and see a mortified, middle-aged cowgirl, clenching her fingers in fear. Done in pencil, her shirt and boots are finely detailed, her expression haunting. On another page, two young women lean against a wall. One looks around the corner, unafraid, while the other, perhaps a girl of 13, has pushed herself flat against the wall, trying to disappear, her face lost in a moment of reflection that the viewer is drawn toward trying to explain or articulate. Flip again and see another young girl, all raw elbows and knees, tucked into a corner, calf-high sweat socks covering lanky legs splayed at odd angles. These are compelling, disturbing, familiar images. And yet they are distant, delivered to us as they are with such confident artistry.
Shary is eager to describe the process she uses to ensure magic seeps into her pen. An artist statement by her reads: “Each work is created by invoking a quiet interior space where the process of envisioning can occur. All works are completed in one sitting, and are not intentionally planned as a series. There is no overpainting, retouching or modifying of the original impetus. The very nature of my work is to rely on the initial spontaneity of inspiration.” So integral is this process to her artistry, that Shary remains relatively mute on the end product –most of her work is without title, text or comment. “I don’t title my paintings or drawings unless they’re specifically about something or someone,” she explains. “I don’t want to lead people.” Shary wants to provoke an emotional or intuitive response from the viewer and believes that “language defines things in a way that is not honest.”
Shary Boyle 101 (Shame and Fame)
Here are the crib notes: Shary graduated from the Ontario College of Art (OCA) in 1994; she is not a “Riot Grrrl”; she pays the rent doing photo research for various Toronto magazines; she lives in an untrendy artist loft; she is 28 years old; she has 11 bookworks to her credit; her artwork was recently censored from a show at the Sea-Tac airport in Seattle, Washington for its “lesbian subtext”; and she will be featured in a compilation entitled Maow-Maow that will be released this October.
This will also be on the final exam: Her artwork graces the cover of the debut album of Merrill Nisker’s band Peaches, and Shary provides visual projections for the band’s lives shows. If you flip to the back page of the August 12, 2000 issue ofSaturday Night you’ll find an oil painting by Shary of two skydivers with their parachutes caught in trees. She starred in the film Work by Kika Thorne. She does miniature sculpture, video installations and her Super-8 films have appeared in Splice This! and the Super Super8 film festivals.
What normally would appear in this paragraph is a dramatic, transformative instance — an anecdote perhaps — depicting the moment when Shary Boyle became “important.” It would confirm a stereotype of how we understand art and artists, an explanation involving creative alchemy where years of work and experimentation finally yield gold.
There is no such moment for Shary. Taken separately, her accomplishments are important, wonderful, and encouraging — but lacking in drama. Only when you stitch them together do you see a pattern emerging, a realization that Shary’s project is something greater than the sum of its parts. As she explains, “I’m not really on the same trajectory as many contemporary art concerns. I’d almost link myself more with narrative and with writers. I practice storytelling. I provide moments of stories.”
Shary might work in many different mediums, but her narrative voice remains consistent. To best understand her, you need to know — if you’ll pardon the pun — the whole story. Shary pulls together the many isolated disciplines of indie art: she draws, she paints, she videos, she acts. Her artistic life is a continuum that, when evaluated in dribs and drabs, seems shameless and provoking. Seeing a drawing of a little girl being caught sucking off a little boy without context (it appears in a bookwork entitled Witness My Shame that is challenging, but not obscene) may enrage knee-jerk reactionaries, but there is a deeper purpose in the fragmented image, part of a larger, immersive, therapeutic, narrative structure. Yes, there are girls slitting wrists and snorting cocaine (I Feel Funny Mommy), but Shary does not do shocking art merely for attention.
Negotiating the Art World
I originally interviewed Shary in the fall of 1999, with the intention of writing a short article about her bookworks for Broken Pencil. Somewhat fortuitously, the piece kept getting delayed, and nearly a year later, I interviewed her again. In 1999, we spent much time talking about her frustrations with the art world shuffle. As she put it, “the business of contemporary art is slick and gross and I don’t relate to it.”
There was also a sense of powerless, which, for someone with as much force of vision and intention as Shary, was very irritating. “The triangle of power in the contemporary art world is bad,” she noted, a triangle that features curators, gallery owners and critics at the top, while “the artist is the lowest, and has the least seniority in the equation.” For Shary, the root of this problem is economic, as “art has become about commerce, instead of creation.”
Twelve months later, Shary appears to be in a better psychological space. In October, she had another solo show — this time at Toronto’s Paul Petro gallery. But Shary’s success is governed by Newtonian physics, and each artistic action creates an opposite and equal reaction. She sold more than half her work at her solo BUSgallery show in June of this year, but is now paying an emotional price. Shary admits that she is still dealing with the “emotional ramifications of letting go of all of that work.” Many of the paintings that were sold had been with Shary for four or five years, and represented a “history and body of work – it was tough to see them go out the door. It was pretty tragic, although it was a gift as well, to be accepted, and of course the money.” After selling very little art, over a long period of time, she had began to believe that “those with integrity don’t get purchased.”
Shary maintains she will always have a part-time job, as she finds the pressure of being a full-time artist unappealing: “I have no interest in trying to think of what the audience is interested in so that I can make my rent.” Shary has acted out this tension between employment and play in Kika Thorne’s 11-minute film Work. “It is a juxtaposition of my life as an artist – my real life – and the things I have to do to survive. It is about work between friends — emotional relationships — or work in day to day living, or work as an artist, or the work you do to get money.”
For Shary, a steady income means, “I don’t have to make a compromise with my art. It’s still on the edge of not being acceptable. It’s confrontational and challenging emotionally. It is erotic, or involves drugs, or pain, or some kind of disorder.” Her most recent book work Some Day I’ll Be Dead (2000) certainly isn’t filled with unicorns and rainbows, instead juxtaposing the somewhat silly (a mummy-like patient sucking food through a tube) with the seriously sick (an angelic waif, leaping from a chimney in her night-gown, floating off this mortal coil.)
Shary’s halting acceptance of her recent success is encouraging – but for her it also reinforces her longstanding fears about the commodification of art, and her desire to avoid this path. Ultimately, she is happy to see her work given prominence, but honest enough to admit to being somewhat confused and disorientated by the process. After reflecting on a busy summer she has concluded that, “I don’t think I want to chase fame the way some people might. I think fame is a real creativity killer.”
Shary sees the “quiet interior space” she relies upon to create threatened by attention. As she puts it, “Fame is really, really loud.” Silence takes on a spiritual quality for Shary. It is a place, a state of mind she visits, draws upon, draws from, and then leaves. It provides a safe zone to explore and detail, a safety that is removed when she shares her work with others. At the same time, the noisy city provides Shary with the outlets to display her work, and puts her within reach of other collaborators and sources of inspiration. “I’m torn,”
Shary explains, “between going to an uber-city, with a vast social history – somewhere in Europe, for example – or getting a little piece of property in Nova Scotia or the Yukon or the NW territories. That’s really seductive to me.” The quiet she seeks is so important that she would be willing to move to a remote place and “give up audience. Give up any idea of commercial or public success. That is a possibility.”
The narrative of the “underground” artist experiencing pangs of regret at the cusp of critical and financial recognition for her years of effort might sound tired, but for Shary it cuts to her core. This is a very important and painful juncture for her to negotiate and her goal is nothing less than ensuring she can continue to make and enjoy the process of artistic creation, instead of getting obsessed with the machinations of the art world.
Riot Grrrl Redux
“Everything written about me in the past six months has used the phrase Riot Grrrl,” sighs Shary during our most recent interview. “Please God, don’t say that. I feel that I’m getting ghettoized into this Riot Grrrl thing and I don’t identify with it at all.”
OK. But what then? If feminism was a reaction against domesticity and objectivity, and if Riot Grrrl was an attempt to recolonize and redefine female sexuality, what should we call Shary’s work? In this post-feminist era, or at the very least, era of post-modern feminism, notions of gender construction and representation are more fluid than ever before. As Shary explains, “I don’t make my work with my head first. I don’t say ‘I’m going to make an image and it’s going to be about women.’ It’s more like a projection of myself. These images are myself and I’m a woman.”
Shary’s spectrum of female experience and interpretation is well displayed in her 1998 bookwork White Mice. A small ink drawing of a horse with a leg missing begins the book, followed by a woman in a bathrobe, applying eyeliner, eyes wide but dulled by the ritual. Next is a beautiful, delicately shaded pencil sketch of a young naked woman, her body covered in barely legible handwriting. Her exposed skin obscured by the noise of the script, with words acting like an x-ray to reveal fears and doubts perhaps, or an attempt to deflect or circumvent whatever judgement we might have etched upon her. A few sketches later, an angry little girl in gumboots pulls a corset tight on a teenage woman. The corset victim appears to drift backward by the force of the strings being yanked, the little girl in gumboots mad at the silliness of the procedure, or perhaps at the thought of one day having to endure a similar initiation into womanhood. The corset woman is looking dazed and compliant, with an expression that suggests surrender.
The final drawing, one of her most haunting, is frustratingly simple: a window and a curtain, beside which is a pair of legs that fade out before forming a waist. I’ve studied it repeatedly, and I never quite know what it is meant to convey. Is it a grinning Cheshire cat attempt to disappear? Is it a demonstration of how women never feel whole or complete? What at first seems an accidental inclusion soon becomes fraught with undisclosed intention.
Shary might draw cute girls, but their anxiety erodes the pleasing facade, creating the aesthetic equivalent of a doll’s dress on a cactus. She prefers a vowel, not a consonant, in the word “girl”
although she would be happiest if the term was eradicated completely (“I don’t feel much like a girl – I’m almost 30,” she notes quietly). She has little use for nasty grrrls, riot grrrls, or guerilla grrrls. “It’s not about denying those histories or not wanting to take part in those voices,” she explains. “I just don’t think it’s necessarily my specific voice. I respect and am in favour of that history, but it’s not my tag. I feel that stuff happened 10 years ago in Olympia, and I wasn’t there.”
Shary’s first bookwork was called V is For Valerie (1997), in which she created illustrations for the late Valerie Solanas’ SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto. For the record, the first sentence of the Solanas salvo reads: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Instead of concerning herself with male gaze, Shary is creating a female equivalent. She seems to say: Here are my experiences, viewed through my eyes, and if it makes you uncomfortable, then that is the point. If Shary has a mentor or contemporary, it’s co-conspirator Merrill Nisker (Peaches), who Shary describes in terms of her “energy and fearlessness and confrontational seductiveness and braveness.” Merrill is all action, according to Shary, and if Merrill wants to do something, it happens, without discussion or dithering.
A Place for Art
The distinction between Shary’s positioning in a kind of gender geography and the subsequent geography of her artwork is slight — many of her drawings and paintings seem to take place in a distant, mythical world, familiar yet fairytale foreign. In the artist statement for her June solo show at BUSgallery, she wrote: “Shameless girls, savage and mysterious women, cats and basements and forests. Ghosts and bedsheets and owls. High heels and knife blades. My dreams merge with a fantasy of what I want life to be: fiercely sensual magic.”
Gender is important, in the sense that her art is populated mainly by girls and women, but the mysticism of her make-believe world is equally crucial. As she puts it, “people are fairly jaded about art. It’s tough to find wonder in art.” Shary’s work forces the viewer to slow down, to assess, to compare against their own experience, and revisit a place they might have thought lost. She fears that the art world triangle deflects artistic reverence. Priorities were less askew in the distant past, argues Boyle. “Making an image was wondrous, magical, awe inspiring. People had respect for visionary powers and the mystique surrounding artistry.”
Shary believes that “everyone has some kind of space where they store their memories and their half-formed understandings of things and their emotional memories and dreams. I think we bury ourselves under the banality of day to day living, especially in the city…it actually takes time to be quiet, to disconnect yourself from the surface of living (worries and anxieties, etc). I think some people never consciously try and connect with that place – it’s too painful or unsettling or disturbing a ritual.” Even those able to visit this place would concede that Shary does it better. Her subconscious storehouse hasn’t become less disturbing over time, but Shary has learned how to express herself in more nuanced ways. In another artist statement, she observed: “What was once starkly overt in its eroticism and emotional confession has become more metaphoric and abstracted. The psychological motifs remain, and are increasingly based in the realm of the fantastic. And while the erotic still plays a role in my imagery, desire becomes suggestive rather than insistent.”
And speaking of the erotic, Shary plays a cruel trick by disguising and deflecting desire. Her work is filled with young girls — pre-pubescents acting “badly” by stealing medicine from the bathroom cabinet or gorging on birthday cake. Yes, there are mothers and older sisters that are allowed to wear makeup and pierce their ears, but there are also tiny girls in witches costumes, crying in closets. Shary confronts the viewer with the hope of sending us to the quiet place in our own brain, to explore and examine ourselves, through her act of personal exorcism. Even if it is sexy, or about sex, there is something dissimilar about it, an uncategorizable other which forces us to think in new and fresh way, instead of reflexively calling upon our stock photo images and ideas about taboo eroticism. The schoolgirl jailbait of a Britney Spears is cliché familiar while the “teen queen” in Shary’s 1998Untitled bookwork, who has both hands down her panties, smiling in wonder while blindfolded, reveals an intensely private moment of real, not manufactured, meaning. Shary forces us to confront and recall our own nascent and ever developing sexuality, while avoiding reductive questions of autobiography. We can’t always find the “real” Shary Boyle in the girls she draws, and it isn’t important that we do. Is she imaging, experience, wishing? It doesn’t matter. The story is not entirely her own: it also belongs to us.
From Reluctant Fame to Zinester Shame
Shary is not trendy. She is concerned with the long-term, with completing the narrative she has begun, rather than ceding to the moment and ruining the plot. In our 1999 interview, she despaired that representational imaginative art had fallen out of favour in the art world. Nevertheless, she has persevered, colonizing and populating her very own unique landscape, and waiting – with varying degrees of patience – for us to discover it. The question is, what will Shary do now that we are here, knocking on the door and asking for a tour?
This is a tension that can be illustrated by the divide between Shary’s bookwork zines and her oil paintings. Shary came to zines only after graduating from art school, in effect progressing — in terms of producing objects valued by the art world — backwards. Now, she is on the forefront of a younger generation of artists, such as Vancouver’s Jason McLean, who are at once taking advantage of the freedom the zine medium allows, while relishing in their implied illegitimacy. For Shary “bookworks are cheap and get the work out there and I have control of it.” They also serve as motivating release, a quick hit or rush that comes from a project that takes a few days, an antidote to her paintings, which are slower — she has produced 30 or so in the past four or five years. Most importantly, bookworks provide feedback, both immediate and more frequent than her gallery showings. The format is less intimidating to those uninitiated in art theory, and since they are aesthetically similar to comics, they facilitate comments, suggestions and interpretations.
Her oil paintings seem more distant — not as immediate and precise — and it is for this reason I like them less than her illustrations. True, through shading and texture of paint, she is better able to convey the shaded, hazy edges of the dreamscape she deals in. But when she drops a small red blot of watercolor onto a pen drawing of a couple kissing, as she did in her BUSgallery show, it augments the dramatic burst of the work far more than her Technicolor canvases.
Despite the apparent simplicity of her drawings, and even after two separate interviews, there remains something beyond the grasp of description or understanding both about Shary as a person and artist. Her flashbulb moments of hidden shame and pain convey an astonishing personal integrity; a way for Shary to tell her story without putting it up for sale.
Ryan Bigge is one of the tallest freelancer writers in Toronto. He has been published in many glossy magazines. His first book, A Very Lonely Planet, will be published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Spring of 2001. See also: www.biggeworld.com
Shary Boyle and the Art of Shame (and Fame)