Katherine Boyer: How the Sky Carries the Sun

×

Expand

Katherine Boyer, "How the Sky Carries the Sun," 2022

Photo credit: Don Hall Photography

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 internalized dualities, expressed as the relationship between the sun and the sky: a connection that exemplifies distinct but supportive experiences. The living paradox of the title is a buoyant state of in-betweenness and potentially contradictory experiences. It represents my queerness and my craftiness that blends with my urge for functionality, my own hard and softness, and my stillness that isn’t still at all. The exhibition title is an invisible through line for structural support to explore a Queer, Métis phenomenology[1]. Phenomenology helps to ask, “Am I the sky or am I the sun?” an important question about self-consciousness and identity.

Utility and functionality are part of Métis aesthetic, which shares commonalities with the intentional and essential experience of “queering” and Queer worldmaking. In this case hardware stores became the place to negotiate use, the handmade, and served as the site to rotate between process and materials. This fluidity can be found at the heart of work such as Cyan Blue Eclipse which employs a creative process that blocks UV sunlight only to reveal plant and animal imagery from a summer of gardening. Similarly, Memories the Sundogs Herd uses light to reveal a range of family recollections about life in the Souris Valley. Recorded as written and oral accounts, these memories do not expressly belong to me but are nevertheless in a state of collection and embodiment that shapes my experience of the Souris Valley as a place. 

Throughout How the Sky Carries the Sun, absent or negative space is the place for the imagined body and a placeholder for oneself. This void functions as an imagined construction site for an internalized sense of home, and space to explore memories, inner conflict, and non-linear timelines and experiences. The Queer Hometown Horizon is a horizon line that wraps itself and contorts around the urban features of my hometown neighbourhood. This hooked rug line reveals the shape of a formative place growing up, while reinterpreting memories and experiences that were once benign but might reveal a young queer experience. The Queer Hometown Horizon is made using mason’s line, a chord used in landscaping to maintain a consistent leveled surface, allowing for the question of urban conformity and heteronormative expectations. This horizon line provides the opportunity to reflect on the impact of place and environment but also gives space to readdress memories. There is a strong link between my body, and the skies of places that have contributed to how I understand myself. These lands contain a resonance that covers generations, and in concert the sky is exclusively for me, is exclusively my perspective, my angle, and orientation.

[1] 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.

BIOGRAPHY

Katherine Boyer (Métis/Settler) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on methods bound to textile arts and the handmade – primarily woodworking and beadwork. Boyer’s art and research encompass personal family narratives entwined with Métis history, material culture, architectural spaces (human-made and natural). Her work often explores boundaries between two opposing things, an attempt to understand both sides of perceived dichotomous identity. This effort to destabilize binary terms manifests itself in her art practise as long, slow, and considerate laborious processes that attempt to unravel and better understand history, environmental influences, and personal memories. 

Boyer has received a BFA from the University of Regina (Sculpture + Printmaking) and an MFA at the University of Manitoba. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba, School of Art.