“Earthlings”

Shary Boyle saw Shuvinai Ashoona’s drawings in 2009 and recognized them at first sight as “home.” This “home” was not a place, and not a language or a culture. For Boyle it was a “shared home of imagination.” Poets talk about the imagination all the time; it crops up less frequently in discussions of contemporary art. Yet as Boyle, a fierce poet who works with material images, well knows, imagination is a creative faculty of mind. Bachelard defined it as “human transcendence.” Einstein valued it over knowledge. It is the crux of “Earthlings,” an exhibition at the Esker Foundation in Calgary, which was instigated by Boyle. The show includes the Toronto-based Boyle, Ashoona, Jessie Kenalogak and four lesser-known clay artists from Rankin Inlet: the late Roger Aksadjuak, Pierre Aupilardjuk, John Kurok and Leo Napayok. These seven contemporary artists, working on paper and in clay, bring imagination to the fore in the creation of art and in the transcendence of difference—of place, language, culture, race, gender and experience. The ensemble dissolves categories that have kept Canadian artists from the North and the South from standing on equal footing.

This last point alone makes “Earthlings” unusual. In the first of a series of three pioneering exhibitions at the Justina M. Barneke Gallery, curator Nancy Campbell paired Boyle and Ashoona in “Noise Ghost,” 2009, placing their works side by side. Few curators followed suit in showing northern and southern contemporary artists together, outside of large group shows, until Boyle and Esker curator Shauna Thompson joined forces on this exhibition. “Earthlings” stands out for other reasons as well. It is a brilliant and revelatory exhibition: almost exhaustingly large, dense, moving, complex, funny and richly textured. It contains mysteries. It is marvellous in that marvels are everywhere you look, in the forms, materials and manufacture of the 67 works, and in the otherworldly, mythological, oneiric realms that these artists pull seemingly from thin air by vaulting from the everyday into the mystical and visionary.

“Earthlings” hums with a chorus of individual voices, each with a distinctive identity, which step forward to perform solos, duets, a trio. The artists are each represented individually, but the workings of imagination are complicated by the collaborations: between Boyle and Ashoona; Boyle and Aupilardjuk; Boyle and Kurok; Boyle, Aupilardjuk and Kurok; Kurok and Napayok; and Kurok and Kenalogak. Ashoona lives and works in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), and Kenalogak is from Baker Lake (Qamani’tuaq), so that along with Rankin Inlet (Kangiqtiniq), three major centres of Inuit art making are represented. Ashoona, who worked with John Noestheden in 2008, and the artists from Rankin Inlet, who frequently work with each other, have a history of working collaboratively. Boyle has collaborated with Ashoona since 2011; she worked with Aupilardjuk and Kurok in 2016 during a month-long residency at the Medalta International Artists in Residence Program, in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

It is the powerful confluence of these disparate individual and collaborative works that gives the whole of “Earthlings” a sense of being its own self-sustaining world. A visit to it is not a lesson; it is an experience of another place, a space filled by the imagination and the spirit of artists for whom the everyday and the miraculous are seamlessly connected. The head of a man in the sculpture by John Kurok and Leo Napayok titled Three Birds (n.d.) is covered protectively by the bowed, outspread wings of the birds, while his face and neck are incised in low relief dense with images of people, animals and traditional daily life. This layered work and the same collaborators’ majestic Man Holding Bird (n.d.), made with similar combined techniques, embody the wellspring of their art in community and shared beliefs and traditions. The metaphysical relationships of animals and human beings permeate many works, but hardly more movingly than in Roger Aksadjuak’s remarkable, elegiac Beneath the Sea I and II (n.d.), vessels appliquéd with the figures of men holding fish to their chests, and hybrid men and seals.

Streams of recurring images that run through “Earthlings” sustain the exhibition’s internal coherence almost subliminally. The head and bust mentioned above are two of five at the beginning of the show that include Boyle’s The Mute, 2012, a delicately coloured porcelain head whose attributes are piscine (painted scales) and vegetal (leaf-like nose), and Siren, 2012, whose multicoloured face is covered with stripes and whose long hair in unglazed low relief is wrapped around her head. Ashoona’s Composition (Hands drawing), 2014, which shows several hands of different skin colours, sets up a theme continued in other drawings, in six sculptures of fantastical hands by Boyle, Aupilardjuk and Kurok, and in Boyle’s delicately modelled realistic terracotta Marc’s hand (drive-by shooting), 2016. Among other motifs, Ashoona and Boyle share snakes, spiders, monsters, animals and adult figures holding the limp figures of dead children. This subject of Ashoona’s drawing Oh my Goodness, 2011, and Boyle’s sculpture Suicide (Attawapiskat), 2016, points to the problem of young suicides in First Nation communities both in and outside the Arctic.

Suicide (Attawapiskat), like Marc’s hand (drive-by shooting), is part of Boyle’s series “Axis and Revolution,” 2016, a diaristic work taken from personal experience and the daily news that contains 31 small, unglazed, terracotta sculptures. Begun during her Medalta residency, it is the first work in this medium by Boyle, who is known for porcelain figures. In the context of “Earthlings” it is a grounding element that suggests how the real is the jumping-off place for the imagination. A small gallery of eight collaborative drawings, in which Boyle and Ashoona drew on the same sheet, including their first collaboration, Universal Cobra Pussy, 2011, erases whatever difficulties one might imagine in cross-cultural exchanges. The two artists have become adept conversationalists in a shared language of the imagination, which is artmaking.

“My impulse to collaborate is always to instigate a wordless responsive exchange of shared space and vulnerability,” says Boyle. “It’s also a game to surprise the other artist, to suggest connections or playfully push meaning into varying paths.”

The wordless responses of collaborations, the play, surprise and interconnectedness among individual works, meanings pushed into varying paths, and the disconcertment and mystery that attend some images are all elements of “Earthlings” that make it an extraordinary exhibition. ❚

“Earthlings” is on exhibition at the Esker Foundation, Calgary, from January 21 to May 7, 2017. It will travel to the Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto, from November 2017 to January 2018, and Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal, in 2018. Nancy Tousley, recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2011, is an art critic, writer and independent curator based in Calgary.