CURRENT EXHIBITION
How the Sky Carries The Sun
Katherine Boyer
January 13 - March 13, 2022
Images: (LEFT or TOP in mobile view) Katherine Boyer, The Sky Vest [detail], fir 2x4 boards, seed beads on smoked hide, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist. (RIGHT or BOTTOM in mobile view) Digital image courtesy of the artist.
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 Boyer's internalized dualities, expressed as the relationship between the sun and the sky. Boyer uses the exhibition title as an invisible through-line for structural support to explore the edges of a Queer, Métis phenomenology. Phenomenology* helps the artist ask "Am I the sky or am I the sun?" an important
question about disorganized experiences and self-consciousness.
Featuring entirely new work, How the Sky Carries the Sun places hard and soft components in complementary and mutually supportive relationships that lay the ground for this internal, yet critical, dialogue. Further, How the Sky Carries the Sun is the axis that allows Boyer to rotate between process and materials: cyanotypes depicting garden plants, lightboxes that use quilting but act as trusses, and knots that close obsessive cycles of labour. Working in this way moves closer toward an erasure of the dichotomous experience.
* 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.
Exhibition documentation by Don Hall.
About Katherine Boyer:
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.
Online artist-led exhibition tour
Debuts online Thursday, February 17, 2022 in conjunction with Sâkêwêwak First Nations Artists' Collectives' Storytellers' Festival.
Watch on YouTube (video unavailable until 8 AM on Thursday, February 17) https://youtu.be/N1ot3fEiADg
Let artist Katherine Boyer lead you through her solo exhibition How The Sky Carries the Sun. Boyer created all new work for her solo exhibition (January 13 – March 13, 2022) at the Art Gallery of Regina. In this online tour, Boyer will explain the layers of meaning — autobiographical, familial, and contradictory — she embeds in her cyanotypes, lightboxes, hooked rugs and beaded textiles through laborious processes and intimate material choices. This talk will be debuted in conjunction with Sâkêwêwak Artist's Collectives' Storytellers' Festival and simultaneously translated into American sign language. Viewers can enjoy a recording of Boyer's artist-led tour online until the end of the exhibition run.
artist's statement:
self-guided tour pamphlet:
exhibition audio tour:
transcript of exhibition audio tour:
artist's recommended readings: https://www.artgalleryofregina.ca/exhibition-related-reading
artist led exhibition walk-through:
watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/N1ot3fEiADg
media coverage:
"On the Go: Art Gallery of Regina." CTV Morning Live. Reported by Kayleen Sawatzky, CTV, Regina, January 13, 2021. https://regina.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=2360567
Morning Live at Global News. Reported by Kimberley Fowler, Global News, Regina, January 17, 2021.
Museums Association of Saskatchewan. Winter 2021/22 Quarterly Report. Regina, SK: MAS, 2022. Print.
Talk of the Town. Reported by Lisa Peters, Access 7, Regina, airs February 9-15, 2021.
Pham, Tak. “Katherine Boyer How the Sky Carries the Sun” esse, issue 105, May 2022, 110. Print. [Online]
media release:
online project commissioned by the AGR and hosted on AKA's website tofeelclose.com: https://tofeelclose.akaartistrun.com/katherine-boyer
THANK YOU
The Art Gallery of Regina is grateful to Sk Arts and the City of Regina for their core funding.
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THANK YOU
The artist acknowledges the support of the University of Manitoba's School of Art and the Terry G. Falconer Emerging Researcher Award.