TORONTO -- In these final days before the reopening of the Art Gallery of Ontario, finishing touches are abounding. Inside the
Toronto museum last week, forklifts were shifting the Henry Moores into position, donor recognitions were being stencilled frenziedly on the walls, and the punch-drunk installation-crew guys were kidding around in the freight elevators between gigs, the bags beneath their eyes as deep as coulees.
The AGO staff were not the only ones up against the wire. A handful of contemporary artists have been commissioned to make new works for the opening of the gallery, each one a strategic intervention into the museum's
permanent collection. In the Galleria Italia - a soaring pine and glass space that runs along the north façade of the building - the Italian artist
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Giuseppe Penone is installing one of the most dramatic of these projects: a multipart work entitled Hidden Life Within, which incorporates a number of carved wooden trees in a meditation on man's place within nature, and
nature's place within man. (One of the trees is a storm-felled cedar from the grounds of Versailles.)
Nearby, the contemporary American artist Kara Walker will be exhibiting a two-part film projection in a gallery
devoted to historical genre painting and the theme of masquerade.
Catherine de Zegher, the museum's director of exhibitions and publications, refers to this room as "a cabinet of alterity." Masking tape on the wall marked the spot where the Walker work will be.Toronto's Tim Whiten and the American artist Willie Cole are contributing freshly commissioned sculptures in side-by-side galleries that will serve as a hinge between the Frum Collection of African art and the European sculpture galleries nearby, their presence underscoring the pivotal discussion between African and European traditions during the modernist period. (As of last week, these works were still in their crates.)
One of the most delicate and ingenious interventions, though, will be the pair of smaller porcelain sculptures by Shary Boyle, a 36-year-old Toronto artist known for her vividly imagined sculptures and paintings tinged with equal measures of sensual delight and quirky, elfin horror. Last weekend, these sculptures were receiving their final touches - gold lustre and a single small diamond - in the artist's warehouse studio in the city's industrial west end, where we met to talk for a few hours.
Boyle's two masterworks are responses to the museum's inventory of Baroque bronzes by Giovanni Battista Foggini, a lesser-known Italian Baroque sculptor from Florence. Invited six months ago by the curators to respond to this collection, Boyle came up with a plan, settling her critical gaze on two of his works in particular: The Rape of Proserpine by Pluto and Perseus Slaying Medusa, both bronzes dating from the early-18th century.
"Well, you know, there sure are a lot of historical sculptures out there about murder, rape and abduction," Boyle says wryly after we sit down to talk, sunlight streaming into a studio space stacked with the porcelain moulds she uses to create her distinctive figurines. With her child-sized navy-blue sweater decorated with animals, her blue jeans, and her wide blue eyes beneath bangs, she comes across as one of the winsome, magical-seeming characters from her own work - a fairy or sprite - until her intelligence slices the air.
"I guess I just felt that this subject matter had to be engaged. That you couldn't just glibly say - 'Oh yeah, I love The Rape of Proserpine, great piece!' - and not address the subject matter," she says. "I had been asked inside the museum, and I felt a kind of responsibility to interrupt some of those narratives, to propose some other kinds of stories."
Boyle's riposte to Foggini has a characteristically fantastical bent, shifting from the obdurate bronze to the delicate material of porcelain, a notoriously labour intensive and fragile sculptural medium that has been used in Europe since the advent of Meissen figurines in the 18th century. Historically, it's a genre of art that often touched upon timely themes of race, class and gender - with its fanciful peasant girls, African slaves, exotic Arabs and lily-skinned shepherd boys - and it's this tradition that she is revitalizing, sharpening its critical edge.
Boyle started the AGO project by immersing herself in the stories behind the sculptures. In the original Greco-Roman myth, she tells me, Pluto, the Lord of the Underworld, fell in love with Proserpine, the beautiful daughter of the harvest goddess. Lust incarnate, he emerges from Hades through a pond in the glade of the water nymph Cyane, wreaking havoc on this sacred sylvan spot and seizing Proserpine by force, making her his bride in Hell. Cyane, who protects the natural realms, weeps tears over this loss, so much so that her tears replenish the landscape Pluto has devastated. Nature is restored, "but Cyane becomes her tears," Boyle says, "and washes herself away."
It's a complicated tale, but - following the art-historical precedent from antiquity onward - Foggini simply portrays Proserpine in the arms of a sinewy Pluto. Her arms flail helplessly, and her face is a study in dainty despair.
In Boyle's sculptural re-imagining, however, Cyane takes centre stage, a large, quasi-amphibious being who guards her world with vigilance. Undefeated, she defends her ward, deflecting Pluto's advances with her mirrored shards and her ferocious, fiery looks. Proserpine, meanwhile, takes on the form of a small child, sitting quietly and watching the confrontation, while her mother looks on from the sidelines. Together, Boyle says, these three female figures - child, mother and nymph - represent emotional, mental and physical resistance under siege. She calls the piece The Rejection of Pluto.
Boyle's second sculpture, titled To Colonize the Moon, responds to the story of Perseus slaying the Medusa, a tale that Boyle has interpreted in light of both her environmentalist and feminist ideas. Where Foggini portrays the dramatic moment before the slaying (Perseus with his sword raised to deliver the blow), Boyle gives us the aftermath. The head of Medusa has been severed and Boyle presents it, with virtuosic skill, as a writhing knot of snakes laid out on a funeral pyre of bees and brown bats - vulnerable denizens of the natural world now threatened with extinction.
"I see Medusa as a very misunderstood monster," Boyle says matter-of-factly. "She's a creature who was simply following her own destiny and was interfered with by another. Medusa did nothing but try to live peacefully in seclusion with her sisters." Even before Perseus showed up to decapitate her, she had been hounded by ill fortune, says Boyle. "First, she was raped by a sea god," enamoured of her luxurious mane of hair, "and then her hair was turned to snakes by a jealous goddess," a punishment for her loss of virtue. It's another prototypical story of havoc-wreaking greed, and the injuries that come in its wake.
In contrast to Foggini's braying victor, though, Boyle's Perseus is a beautiful, rosy-cheeked boy, who she poses delicately wiping the blood from his sword. His cloak of African textiles alludes to Europe's violence against colonized people. Tomorrow, she says, she will affix a small diamond to the front clasp of his cape, this final touch emblematic of the diamond mining in Africa which brought such devastating and relentless exploitation of the continent's natural resources and its people.
If Perseus here is the incarnation of such rapaciousness, why, then, does she make him so lovely?
"I see him as childlike," says Boyle. "Human beings just want to be comfortable, to be warm in the winter, to have food to eat. We just take what we want; we clutch and we grab like children. It's an innate compulsion of our species. We are all complicit."
Does this dewy youth represents the infantile state of our evolution as ethical beings? Perhaps, she suggests wisely, we are just too new to the planet to have learned our place.
Shary Boyle's work will be
on view at The Art Gallery
of Ontario, which opens to the public on Nov. 14.
