Canadian_Art_2016_S_

138 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016

Ideas of hybridity, transgression and the marginal are often aligned with

politics of subversion, resistance and dissent. This is particularly true for

art that ventures into the realms of the fantastic or grotesque, infecting

the everyday with an otherness that, in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin (as

translated by Hélène Iswolsky), “discloses the potentiality of an entirely

different world, of another order, another way of life.” Celebrated for

revealing a hidden political reality, or warping the status quo beyond

recognition, such art is said to use monsters, mutation and estrangement

in service of a heretical worldview.

Both Shary Boyle and Shuvinai Ashoona have had their work framed

in this way, and their recent joint exhibition offered ample fodder for

such an interpretation. Organized by Pierre-François Ouellette art con-

temporain in partnership with Feheley Fine Arts, “Universal Cobra” was

a spellbinding exhibition that explored chimeras of imagination and

otherness. Its lodestone was a suite of six drawings created according

to a loose version of the exquisite-corpse methodology, with each artist

preparing incomplete drawings, leaving white space for their counterpart

to fill. The resulting compositions—created during a week spent hang-

ing out, listening to music and cracking jokes at the Kinngait Studios,

Cape Dorset, Nunavut—are alive with hybrid creatures, surreal morphol-

ogy, amusing non-sequiturs and provocative juxtapositions of European

and Inuit cultural references. The exhibition is rounded out with a care-

ful selection of drawings, done by each artist separately, as well as their

first collaborative work, Universal Cobra Pussy (2 011) and several of Boyle’s

porcelain sculptures. Bold yet vulnerable, the latter are displayed without

vitrines on a specially built plinth that winds through the centre of the

gallery like a snake, or an ice floe.

It is certainly tempting to read this exhibition’s intricate blend of

monstrosity, humour, beauty and myth as a kind of ideological critique,

but that’s not the only interpretation. “Universal Cobra” provocatively

mixes imagination and politics with skilful references to mythology, art

history, sexuality, colonialism and capitalism. But it is also fundamentally

about cooperation and friendship. The multi-headed monsters, Greco-

Roman statuary, strange beasts and hybrid creatures that fill it thus hold

a dual significance: they disturb, their blurred boundaries undermining

cultural norms and wreaking havoc with our sense of reality; and they

bestow hope, demonstrating how seemingly incompatible and disparate

particulars can come together to form new, cooperative unities.

REVIEWS

MONTREAL

PIERRE-FRANÇOIS OUELLETTE ART CONTEMPORAIN

SHUVINAI ASHOONA

AND SHARY BOYLE

by Emily Falvey

Shuvinai Ashoona and Shary

Boyle Black Marble 2 015

Ink on paper and coloured

pencil 91 x 107 cm COURTESY

FEHELEY FINE ARTS/PIERRE-FRANÇOIS

OUELLETTE ART CONTEMPORAIN

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