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Seven master storytellers compose the heart of an exhibition that forces audiences to take a sincere but distant look at humankind

Collaboration is at the centre of the Earthlings exhibition, from the wild, morphological drawings of Shary Boyle’s continuing partnership with Kinngait artist Ashoone to her team-ups with Matchbox Gallery sculptors. The installation proposes a model of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communication that employs art as its language.

If Martians were watching humankind, what would they see? What might a distant eye perceive that ours – too embodied in rank and position – cannot? What's the same about us? This is the question, asked and pursued earnestly, that forms the heart of the exhibition Earthlings.

Approached for a solo show at Calgary's Esker Foundation, Toronto-based artist Shary Boyle took the opportunity instead to present new artwork alongside that of some of her favourites. She invited the sculptural and paper works of six artists from Kangiqtiniq/Rankin Inlet, Kinngait/Cape Dorset and Qamani'tuaq/Baker Lake, which, produced from distinct cultural and geographic contexts, explore similar labour-intensive technical practices and an almost identical interest in visual storytelling.

The exhibition has travelled now to its second stop: The University of Toronto Scarborough’s Doris McCarthy Gallery.

The exhibition has travelled now to its second stop: The University of Toronto Scarborough's Doris McCarthy Gallery. Though the art world often cleaves North and South – Inuit and contemporary – both commercially and institutionally, with Earthlings, Boyle declares her artistic kin. It's in the work of Shuvinai Ashoona, Roger Aksadjuak, Pierre Aupilardjuk, Jessie Kenalogak, John Kurok and Leo Napayok that she finds her contemporaries. Sincerity is their common ground – a belief in the communicative and narrative powers of art. No thought is beyond expression in clay or in pencil crayon. To visit Earthlings is to warm to the imaginations and idiosyncrasies of seven master storytellers.

On a table in the east gallery, visitors find a stoneware hand by Rankin Inlet ceramicist Aupilardjuk titled Giving Without Receiving. Growing from its wrist, an Inuk holds out their kudlik, a traditional oil lamp. "My father and mother had a kudlik that they'd use in the igloo," Aupilardjuk says. "It was their only source of heat and light. A teacher from another community wanted one. The priest told them he would take theirs. So my father and my mother had no more light or heat." They gave up something so important, and for it, they received nothing. Aupilardjuk's work, he says, is to remember the stories his parents passed down and retell them in clay.

Facing Forward, 2016 by Pierre Aupilardjuk and Shary Boyle.

The pieces included in Earthlings are examples of what Boyle calls "bridge art." It's work that identifies and reinforces our connections: ancestral legends, family histories, psychological landscapes, our struggles, fears and desires. The stuff of being human.

"We're really at loggerheads right now," she says. There's a reckoning happening – a very necessary emergence of painful histories, she calls it. And it's going to be happening for a long time. "But we can't segregate."

Sculptures (L-R): Shary Boyle, Prayer Shawl/Prayar Scarf, 2016; Roger Aksadjuak, Four Dreams, 2002; John Kurok and Leo Napayok, Three Birds, Three Faces. Drawings (L-R): Shuvinai Ashoona, Untitled, 2013; Shuvinai Ashoona, Untitled (Birthing Scene), 2013.

That's why collaboration is at the centre of the show – from the wild, morphological drawings of Boyle's continuing creative partnership with Kinngait artist Ashoona to her team-ups with Matchbox Gallery sculptors produced during a 2016 residency at Medalta in Medicine Hat. Earthlings proposes, Boyle says, a model of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communication and relationship building that employs art as its language.

It is an exhibition equally of muscular imaginations, skillful hands and tremendous heart. In pursuit of the human condition, it charts deep through inner space. Every work is revealed as a cosmos onto itself. Perhaps that's what the Martians, looking in, will find: The earthlings each make up private universes, intricate stories to make sense of the world around them. Then they share them with each other.


The Earthlings exhibition will continue at the University of Toronto's Doris McCarthy Gallery through January 27.