Katherine Boyer: How The Sky Carries The Sun

×

Expand

Katherine Boyer, "The Sky Vest," 2021

[detail], fir 2x4 boards, seed beads on smoked hide. Photograph courtesy of Katherine Boyer.

Katherine Boyer: How the Sky Carries The Sun

Opening reception: Thursday, January 13, 7-9 pm

Artist's talk: An online artist-led exhibition tour launches Thursday, February 17, in conjunction with Sâkêwêwak First Nations Artists' Collectives' Storytellers' Festival. 

"How the Sky Carries the Sun" is a universe that extends beyond the artist's complex and seemingly dichotomous identity (Métis and white Settler). This exhibition explores Boyer's internalized dualities, expressed as the relationship between the sun and the sky. Boyer uses the exhibition title as an invisible through-line for structural support to explore the edges of a Queer, Métis phenomenology. Phenomenology* helps the artist ask "Am I the sky or am I the sun?" an important question about disorganized experiences and self-consciousness.

Featuring entirely new work, "How the Sky Carries the Sun" places hard and soft components in complementary and mutually supportive relationships that lay the ground for this internal yet critical dialogue. Further, "How the Sky Carries the Sun" is the axis that allows Boyer to rotate between process and materials: cyanotypes depicting garden plants, lightboxes that use quilting but act as trusses, and knots that close obsessive cycles of labour. Working in this way moves closer toward an erasure of the dichotomous experience.

* In this context, a helpful description of phenomenology comes from author Sara Ahmed: "Phenomenology can offer a resource for queer studies insofar as it emphasizes the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds." Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006. Page 2.

The artist acknowledges the support of the University of Manitoba's School of Art and the Terry G. Falconer Emerging Researcher Award.