ARTEXT : La Biennale di Venezia
55 Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte
Giardini di Castello - Canada 

MUSIC for SILENCE
Shary Boyle

Where the hell am I now? The short answer is in Shary Boyle's world, where a gutsy exploration of fantasy and imagination has always run headlong into the very physical realities of the human body and its needs and cravings.
What does this have to do with Music for Silence? Every person knows the stars of the night sky we all know the feeling of what it's like to accrue experience, and the young person, the child in the centre of that, and being an old person and having endurance and strength to carry all of that experience and keep going these are experiences that any person could have, I thought long and hard about subjects that do not require written explanation, no shared language. That's how it involves music, because in a way I created something more like a score, like a film. We all know how to respond to music. People don't need to be told what it means they just respond with their intuition and their fear and their body you trust yourself in that response.

Visitors enter a dark, silent space.
It's a dark space, an intimate universe. It's quiet only the slight whir of the 16-mm film and there's a little bit of antiquated technology. They see people struggling with the burdens of their individual planets that represent the experience of being alive and the massiveness of the world, she said. At the centre of her installation is a sea deity more than three metres long and made of plaster in an all-white cave that is lit up with colourful projections. Her wizened face is ancient, yet she conjures the Hans Christian Anderson version of The Little Mermaid, who traded her beautiful voice to attain mortality. It feels like an underwater grotto.

It's also about the precipice of the known and the unknown world, very much dealing with the idea of morbidity. She's in this underground place that is maybe the final place that you'd go before you would enter the underworld. She's a guardian of the next world, Boyle said.

the exhibition is for the silenced / the unspoken / what we watch, witness and can't name for the indigenous who watch as the earth is sucked and torn / for the losers and freaks and the ones who don't fit in and never will for the girls who get shot in the head for going to school / for the activists.

There, Boyle invited two Canadian musical acts to play first, Christine Fellows, with whom Boyle has collaborated for many years, and second, Vag Halen, an all-female hair-metal cover band.

I've asked two bands that I feel like I want to share this opportunity with, because Music for Silence is an exhibition-as-composition, Boyle said.

I see [the Venice exhibition] almost as a composition or score, she explained, adding, I also hope that people do listen [to the exhibition] differently almost listen in a way they would listen to music or a different art form, a silent film or something. I'm trying to break the habits of contemporary art a little bit.

Curatore : Josee Drouin-Brisebois
Artista : Shary Boyle

Web site: http://www.gallery.ca/venice/20.htm