Sundays are about relaxing and sometimes about meditating in silence about the few last days while programming the week ahead. So let's move along this lines and consider for today Shary Boyle's "Music for Silence" installation for the Canada Pavilion at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale.
The installation showcases the wide range of media Boyle uses in her practice - sculpture, painting, performance and film - and explores ideas of silence, isolation and solitude, starting outside the pavilion with a mysterious child-like figure, "Ophiodea". The sculpture is perched atop of a column as if it were guarding the building, while weaving a maypole down one of the main columns.
Inside the space three porcelain figurines carry planets and constantly revolve on top of vintage turntables. The figurines hint at the solitude of human beings in the enormity of the universe and at our insignificant roles within it, but also evoke resistance and resilience.
In a black and white film, an elderly woman translates in sign language a moving text by the artist that prompts visitors to consider all the things that can't be spoken and all those people who can't speak: the list is long and includes activists, losers, freaks, the old and the ugly, the mentally frail, people who don't fit in, women who are not listened to and girls who get shot in the head for going to school.
In another corne of the pavilion, in an underwater cave, the plaster figure of a mythological creature with a fishtail, a sort of sea deity, is nursing an infant, but the scene completely changes when mysterious and disturbing collages of images are projected upon it.
Even though the pavilion is quiet, the artist was actually inspired by music while creating it. As she states in a press release: "In conceiving of this installation, I thought a lot about the emotional entitlement we afford ourselves when we are moved by a song. I considered experiencing art as one would music; with trust in perception and intelligence of feeling. Each object is a note; building an arc and repeating; suggesting cycles and rhythms."
While Shary Boyle's narrative is visionary, upsetting and at times hallucinating, and her alternative worlds are inhabited by legend-like hybrid and ambiguous beings, in her work the artist hints at different themes, quite often evoking feminist and social concerns, investigating life and death, reality and the imaginary, and exploring psychological and emotional states.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and PhotosMember of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments