By Peter Rozek

Canadian Residency is pleased to announce that Canadian Artist Shary Boyle is coming to Detroit through our Knight Arts Challenge-funded program! Boyle starts off her stay in Detroit, Wednesday April 2nd at 6 p.m. speaking as a part of the Cranbrook Art Museum’s [Spring] Edition Lecture Series.

Shary Boyle: Burden I, 2010. Porcelain, china paint, luster. 36 x 36 x 30. Photo by Rafael Goldchain Ⓒ2010.Image courtesy of the artist

Shary Boyle: Bridge and Chorus, 2013. Porcelain, glazes, luster, vintage turntable, vinyl record, timer sequencer. 48 x 41 x 41. Image courtesy of the artist.

The talk will held in the Cranbrook Art Museum’s deSalle Auditorium located at 39221 Woodward Avenue, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48303. It’s free to ArtMembers and Cranbrook students with identification, and included with admission to the general public. General admission costs $8, $6 for 65+, and $4 for students with identification. Parking is available in the Cranbrook Museum parking lot and in the parking deck next to the Institute of Science.

Shary Boyle: Dealer, Artist, Curator, 2009. Ink and collage on paper. 91 x 79. Image courtesy of the artist.

Shary Boyle: White Light, 2010. Foam, string, textile, porcelain, hair, black light. 305 x 305 x 183. Photo courtesy of Art Gallery of Ontario Ⓒ2010.

Highly crafted and deeply imaginative, Boyle’s multi-disciplinary practice mines the history of porcelain figurines, animist mythologies and shadow plays to investigate desire, power and vulnerability through a darkly feminist lens. Splitting her time between the solitude of the studio and the social exchange of collaborative spectacle, her practice includes drawing, painting, sculpture and performance. Boyle represented Canada in 2013 at the Venice Biennale with her project Music for Silence.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Venice Biennale, it is like the Olympics for visual art, with each country selecting an artist every two years to represent them in Venice, so we are extremely flattered that she accepted our invitation! Below you can see a couple photos of her installation from the Canadian Pavilion in Venice.

Shary Boyle: The Cave Painter, (details), 2013. Plaster, wood, foam, synthetic hair, sculpting epoxy, metal, acrylic, glitter, glass, 3 overhead projectors on custom sculpted plinth, photo-collage projection acetates, timer sequencer. 301 x 427 x 45. Photos by Rafael Goldchain Ⓒ 2013

Our program, Canadian Residency, offers Canadian visual artists a two month residency in Detroit’s Eastern Market as a way to shed a positive light on all the great things about the Detroit/Windsor Binational Region. You can find out more about us by visiting our website at CanadianResidency.us.

While you’re on the website, we’d love to know your most and least favorite thing about Detroit! You can tell us by visiting our Contact Us Page. We are going to share your responses with the Knight Foundation to help guide neighborhood rejuvenation strategies in the City of Detroit.

You can even make a donation through our Kickstarter campaign to help fund a second year of our program in 2015 by clicking on our Donate Page. For every donation, we will mail you one of our postcards spotlighting the Detroit/Windsor Region, thanking you for your help. Along with the postcard, donations of $250 or more will also receive a letter from our fiscal sponsor acknowledging your contribution to our charitable purpose. Donations of $500 or more will not only receive this letter, but we will ask one of our favorite Detroit artists to draw something special on the back of the postcard before we send it out!

Thank you for all of your help, and we look forward to seeing you at Cranbrook on April 2nd!