21 wade ave, unit 2, toronto

Shary boyle | NIGHT VISION | 24 OCTOBER – 19 DECEMBER, 2026

down to the ground

The earth is calling our ears to press against her. And if we stay silent, relinquish our cleverness for a curiosity that is keenly listening and is willing to kneel, the long and low notes of the latest call will arrive with the lonely and the latest grace. This is the formal and tender notes of arriving home. How could this reunion not be the sap of art right now? The complex syrup that offers a taste of the deep grief, the green glory, and the rage of these days. And how can this complexity not alight and shift from art to land in us, seeding the startling recognition a new understanding arrives with, carried over the dark miles of our time, here and now and real? As in, we are in this together? The wolves and the bats and the whales and the snakes and the frogs, the bonobos, you and me and them, touching foreheads, drawn together in these thickening hours because our lives depend on it.

What a quandary: all the fuckery that brought us here and the great pulsing dear greenness unearthing its newest fronds despite it all.

I’m watching how art is adapting, learning to sing in a higher key to be heard now above the racket. How some art has had to get smaller and is staying undeground in the daylight. And how some art is growing longer beaks to get at the thing, the unspeakable that’s nesting in our histories. How some art is daring the edge, flowering as it falls. How some art is refusing to hatch and how some art is bashing into yachts, stealing bird spikes to build with. Some art is panting and is no longer eating. Some art is singing its call then rusting in the brash quiet of no response. Some art is warming and some art is dying. Some art is taking in strays and the lost.Some art feeds a new hunger. Some art escapes the butcher and lives on an island by itself. Some art refuses to get up after suffering too much loss. Some art is heavy and some art weighs only pond shush. Some art is touching us with mourning gloves and some art is taking its ink from Venus’s dark retrograde, holding its knife in its teeth as it swims. Some art is squirrelling the future and some art can’t imagine the next day. Some art is refusing the painting hand, demanding instead its fingers push deeper into dirt, into fur, into snarl, into chase, tasting everything and refusing all the tired, wilted forms. And some art isn’t adapting, insisting instead on a repeat of spring, its tulip cups and brave forsythia.

But what is art that is willing to risk transformation (the sacred verb), like a bear, its fur whiffling with the wind, utterly blending into field? This is the frequency Shary Boyle’s Night Vision is working in. All the things: the creatures, the past, the future, the wild, the rage, the grief, the stories and us, blending. How this art whiffles us a future.

— Sue Goyette

Shary Boyle was born in Scarborough, ON in 1972. Her multidisciplinary practice continues the human tradition of personal, social and political reflection centering the figure, rooted firmly in the personal and handmade. Envisioning deeply imaginative, idiosyncratic, and unsettling worlds, Boyle is an early innovator of live animation with overhead projectors and decorative ceramics in the contemporary art discourse. Boyle activates her practise through collaboration and community, with a spirit of curiosity, inclusivity and bridge-building. Her collaborative outreach has included musicians, artists, hobbyists, ASL performers and translators, tradespeople, mechatronic designers, writers, circus and theme park entertainment creators, dancers, mimes, puppeteers, costume designers, acrylic nail artists, community folk artists, and jewelry smiths. She is an A.I. objector, and centres the ethos of peer equality, crediting, and paying those she works with.

Shary Boyle represented Canada with her project Music for Silence at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and her work has been featured at the 2017 Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale in South Korea and the 2021 Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania. Boyle is the recipient of Canada’s Hnatyshyn Foundation Award, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, and holds a 2021 Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design University. Boyle’s solo exhibition Outside the Palace of Me was organized by Toronto’s Gardiner Museum and toured seven North American museums, including the Vancouver Art Gallery (2023) and the Museum of Art and Design in NYC (2023/24). A survey of 25 years of her socio-political projects, How We Are, was presented in spring 2026 by the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Shary Boyle currently lives and works in Toronto and Tantramar, New Brunswick.

Sue Goyette lives in K’jipuktuk (Halifax) and has published several books of poems and a novel. Her latest collection is Future Howl, (Gaspereau Press, 2025). She is the editor of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (Anansi, 2017) and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and German and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spray painted on a sidewalk and tattooed.