Outside the Palace of Me: A Conversation with Shary Boyle | Pamela Beyer
January 9, 2023
view of the exhibition Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me, MMFA, 2022–23 | image: Denis Farley
In a virtual room, I met Shary Boyle to talk about her solo exhibition Outside the Palace of Me at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts. We chose to keep the video off to align ourselves with the feeling of a phone conversation and to eliminate any distractions our images might cause peering out for recognition. Outside the Palace of Me deals in identity, not by blurring its edges but by revealing them in all their various stages of construction. Boyle’s artworks engage with identity by incorporating structures of theatre, such as the dressing room, the playbill, the long runway stage, and uncanny automaton sculptures that spring with and without provocation. Boyle is the kind of benevolent conductor who desires every spectator to see how they are – and will remain – performers after leaving the museum. In our conversation, she was generous as we talked about the precariousness of identity, and the mythology and mundanity of autobiography. I have edited out, in honour of art as theatre, some very beautiful excerpts. Outside the Palace of Me runs at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts until January 15, 2023.
–Pamela Beyer
Pamela Beyer
The first installation, Dressing Room, set a tone of witnessing and being witnessed that carried throughout the show.
Shary Boyle
A dressing room is where costumes, makeup, and mirrors form a special set in your dreaming life, deep and vibrating. I used to have a dream when I was a kid of continuously getting lost backstage above a theatre. There was no one there after hours, just room after room full with the potential to dress up as any kind of character outside my realm of experience. This was an opportunity to be somebody you weren’t. As a kid, I had a big imagination about what it would be like to be grown up all connected to sexuality and that burgeoning sense of the potential cells that were unformed.
A dressing room is the space where you prepare yourself to be in public as a person. That person is up to you to create, and the character you’re about to play isn’t totally aligned with who you might think you are. Maybe who you are is unformed, but you still have to determine some way to face the world. Each of us is trying to figure it out. It’s so interesting when you’re alone looking in the mirror.
Shary Boyle, Cephalophoric Saint, 2018 | image: Toni Hafkenscheid
PB
Reading over my reflections, they all carry a thread related to intimacy and an acknowledgement of what it means to view and be viewed.
SB
Surveillance, in the end.
PB
Yes, but your exhibit invites vulnerability. Lingering in the dim enclosed Dressing Room, reading the pamphlet or playbill you provided, I was able to witness other patrons experiencing the art unaware of me. I felt folded into that intimacy.
SB
Not everyone will take the pamphlet. You were drawn to it because of your character. You wanted to read it to get something. But you are familiar with the form. Many people I’ve watched, they go through and walk right by it.
I made the choice to give people the option to read the pamphlet. I put no didactic text in there whatsoever, which is unconventional. There’s nothing to inform. I wanted people to feel empowered as a performer in the show’s circumstance. It is up to them to engage and interpret according to their own experience.
PB
The museum space is so particular. The expectations one brings about appropriate levels or modes of engagement –
SB
I was trying to upend that.
Shary Boyle, The Painter, 2019 | image: John Jones
PB
I loved the nuances of gaze in each sculpture – the mirrors in the lenses of the eyes that divert reflections (Lens, 2020) or the impacted eyes (Focus, 2020). These gazes start and stop, stabilize and destabilize.
SB
I am really trying to get people to look. We are so inundated with visual information that there is a part of us, as a kind of self-defence, skimming the surface constantly.
PB
Encountering The Painter (2019) I had to reposition my body to see how the sculpture experiences its own mirrored reflection. This made me feel complicit in the construction of its self-image.
Depending on where I stood, its face presented differently.
SB
You were like the chorus of an opera: anonymous but still setting the tone. People march toward the exhibit like a performer, and those small super intimate details in the works on either side of the platform draw people in really close as they start examining every inch to the point where they’ve fallen off the stage. A few people have fallen and become disembodied because of this experience of looking deep into these little characters.
PB
For me, the pamphlet is textually akin to reading a script where you’re compelled to embody someone or something else’s interiority. But I never felt restricted in my movements or in the way I chose to look.
SB
If an artist offers a sincere vulnerability in their works, they give permission to the viewer to come and meet them in kind. There is a lot of care in the making of these works and humour that doesn’t set people up to feel excluded.
view of the exhibition Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me, MMFA, 2022–23, with Scarborough in foreground left | image: Denis Farley
PB
I think the child of my selves responded to this. The long, sticking-out tongues and abrupt movements in Scarborough (2020) and White Elephant (2021) challenged my expectations of movement playfully.
SB
Scarborough is a kind of self-portrait, but not in any accurate physical way. I grew up in Scarborough, and the character is based on a Hummel figurine that soldiers brought back from Germany in WWII. They were a popular working-class decoration in Canada for white people: these little chubby children carrying sticks with a bag on the end. Little boots, big-eyes welling up with tears, caught in the rain, so nostalgic and saccharine. That sense of false innocence. Instead of the traditional porcelain I chose terracotta, which to me means baked earth, clay of the people, the body, the soil of the earth and body. I wanted to talk about being a working-class kid, without a sense of sophisticated culture, in a forgotten place – a tough place to grow up in the 70s if you were creative or strange or different.
I read a lot of fairy tales as a child. There’s the idea of striking out to make your fortune as a young person, leaving home with your bindle stick and heading off. There is a little bit of that mythology. But plunked on top of its head is a porcelain head, an image pulled from the marginalia of medieval illuminated manuscripts. These early origins show the concept of a terrifying monster that at all costs must be kept out – a woman constantly conniving to fuck things up. This idea is at the root of our culture. I had to self-educate my way out of that head, a monk’s doodle in the margins, plunked onto this folksy body raised up in a basic place.
PB
Terracotta evokes a porousness or stages of formation and reformation.
SB
It is permeable.
PB
The monstrous head is porcelain!
SB
Vitreous, impermeable. It is class. The class that gets put on top of you. It is up to you to somehow find your way out. These motifs: a hand-carved wooden base with poison ivy and lily of the valley, both flowers very much a part of my childhood; the bindle stick with a coin on it, the bicentennial coin of Scarborough collected by my father in 2007. Metaphors: a stubby Labatt’s 50 bottle, my dad’s beer of choice; a pack of Rothman’s in my jean shorts, my dad’s cigarette of choice; an old porn mag, ripped and stuck to a fence you might pass on your way to school.
Shary Boyle, The Sculptor, 2019 | image: John Jones
PB
This is a beautiful mythologizing of memory, both autobiographical and cultural. I’m curious about how artistic labour and process collapse into the labour implicit in the presentation or interpretation of self.
SB
I think about artifice and art, and how they fit into each other. Making the self is so much like making art. I have an old-fashioned practice where I spend 8 to 10 hours a day alone in my studio. I go in, dissemble, and over the course of the day I remake myself. Every day you’re broken apart. You’re given the opportunity to let your shoulders down, away from the world looking at you. If you go without it for too long, you start to feel like a snail that’s had their shell ripped off.
PB
Absence in your exhibit, for me, is revelatory and intimate. It reminds me that I am only comfortable when I am alone, away from outside perception, not engaged in the distillation of my selves.
SB
This happens for everyone on a scale. The idea that we have a set identity that is fixed is a falseness. People, when they’re alone, often don't have a clue about who or what they are.
view of the exhibition Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me, MMFA, 2022–23, with Centering in foreground | image: Denis Farley
PB
I want to call Centering (2021) the star. The way she moves felt like a kind of freedom. Inserting my coin and pumping the pedal with my foot, I felt the soaring of the materials as the work spun higher only to abruptly stop.
SB
I wanted to talk about pottery. The ancient form of the vessel as another word for the body, and clay as another word for flesh. A kinetic sculpture on a pottery wheel materially inspired me. With the audience-performer relationship, I knew I needed to have a star, a celebrity that showed how we position ourselves through social media as the stars of our own life stories. We’re all cottage industry celebrities on an endless ring towards space. The most brutalizing thing you can do to a human is to shun them, without legacy, resources or status. We all want to be the one that everyone adores, approves of, admires, envies.
PB
Desire for status is a desire for a kind of freedom. Pressing the foot pedal, I felt that freedom, its absence and my continued desire for it.
SB
How painful! The freedom we’re seeking can’t be perpetual because we’re mortal.
Shary Boyle works across diverse media, including sculpture, painting, installation and drawing. She is known for her bold, highly crafted and deeply imaginative explorations of the figure. Boyle thrives on collaboration and mentorship. In her practice, she considers the social history of ceramic figurines, animist mythologies and folk art forms to create a symbolic, feminist and politically charged language that is uniquely her own. Shary Boyle’s work is exhibited and collected internationally, and she represented Canada at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
Pamela Beyer is a writer interested in the affective transmissions between identity, trauma, and language. Her poetry has been published in Vallum Magazine, Headlight Anthology, and Yiara Magazine. She recently completed a Master of Arts Degree in English Literature at Concordia University.
