Part of Fall 2007
Performances by Liss Platt,
Anna Linda Sidall & Jason Benoit,
Dark Hand and Lamplight
(Shary Boyle & Doug Paisley)
Join us for an evening of live projections by two celebrated Canadian artists, Shary Boyle and Liss Platt. Platt will be premiering a newly edited version of You Can’t Get There From Here, originally commissioned for Pleasure Dome’s Sweet 16 programme in 2005. Using a bicycle-powered 16mm projector (exquisitely designed by Petra Chevrier and Martin Heath), Platt will take you on a journey through her childhood. “You Can’t Get There From Here Redux explores themes of movement, physicality, pursuit and flight within the context of a coming-of-age story. As a performance, my presence in the space, pedaling to trigger the projection, will forefront my body – its motion and effort. My laboured breathing will mix with the soundtrack of the film, blurring the boundaries between the filmic and the corporeal. The performance will make manifest a crucial aspect of my coming-of age-story: that my active and live body stands in contrast to my sister’s debilitated body.” (Liss Platt)
After a celebrated tour in the US with American musician Will Oldham and recent performances in London Shary Boyle returns to Toronto to present Dark Hand and Lamplight, a collaboration with songwriter and musician Doug Paisley. Her unique audio-visual performances feature emotionally charged “live” drawn narratives that are hand-animated on an overhead projector. For the project Dark Hand and Lamplight, Paisley wrote a collection of new songs which Boyle uses as the basis for live drawings. In the true spirit of improvisation, Dark Hand creates artwork that Lamplight then uses as the basis for his own musical improvisations. Choreographed to the lyrics and music, Dark Hand projects her artwork onto a screen, the wall, Lamplight, and other available surfaces. Critical, enchanting and humorous, Boyle’s work is raw with human vulnerability and dysfunction.
Shary Boyle currently lives and works in Toronto, though her career has involved travel and residencies in several European countries. Boyle is a performance artist, sculptor and painter as well as a filmmaker. She has become known for the deeply personal and psychologically moving content of her imagery, which recalls the anxieties, desire and bittersweet fantasy worlds of childhood and adolescence. Critical, enchanting and at times humorous, Boyle’s work is raw with human vulnerability and dysfunction. Boyle’s graphic novel Witness my Shame, a compendium of 16 mini-books she created between 1997 and 2001, was published in 2004. Boyle also collaborates with musicians, creating “live” drawings, which are animated and projected onstage during their performances. She has worked with Peaches at the Sonic Youth-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Los Angeles and most recently performed in 2005 with Feist at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris. In 2006, her work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Power Plant, Toronto, as well as with work by Daniel Barrow, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby in Fantasia, at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects. Recently, a collection of Shary Boyle’s polymer clay miniature sculptures was featured at The Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, Waterloo. Shary is currently living in London, England, in a residency at Space Studios, awarded by the Canada Council’s International Studio Program. Upon her return in fall 2007, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge is mounting a comprehensive touring exhibition of Boyle’s multi-disciplinary practice (November 2007). This exhibition will be accompanied by a book on Shary Boyle’s art, with an essay by National Gallery of Canada Curator of Contemporary Art Josée Drouin-Brisebois, published by Conundrum Press, Montreal in association with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.
Shary Boyle has been chosen as a finalist for the Sobey Art Award. A national curatorial panel has selected five finalists, one from each of the five regions, for the $50,000 prize presented by Scotiabank.
Liss Platt is a multimedia artist who creates works in video, film, photography, installation, performance, web art, and any combination thereof. Her art practice, in the broadest sense, revolves around an exploration of the complex processes by which individuals become constituted as subjects. Through a combination of personal narrative, critical analysis, gender politics, and strategies of appropriation, Platt examines how various representations and discourses shape our understanding of ourselves within the world. Her most recent film/video work utilizes experimental documentary techniques to grapple with issues of irreconcilability and the state of being in between.
Her video and film works have been screened throughout the United States and Canada, as well as in England, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Russia, Bratislava (Slovak Republic), Mexico, Croatia, and Japan. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and participated in residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Banff, Alberta (2001 and 2007) and the Daimon Centre for New Media Production in Gatineau, Quebec (2004). She received MFA from the University of California at San Diego in 1992, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in NYC in 1992-93. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Multimedia at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
