“The Illuminations Project” now on view

Shary Boyle and Emily Vey Duke: The Illuminations Project, opens February 3, 2018, at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the result of the title artists’s decade-long friendship and collaborative output. The touring exhibition will be on view at the gallery until April 29, 2018.

Boyle and Duke first met as emerging artists in 1995. While living in separate cities, they spent many years communicating primarily through letters and drawings. The project is a type of call-and-response between Duke’s written correspondence and Boyle’s vibrant drawn and painted replies.

Boyle has also shared in a creative exchange on several occasions with Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona, who is known for her large, fantastical drawings of otherworldly beings. The artists’s works share a similar dream-like quality and expressive use of colour that gesture to altered states of mind and shifting perceptions. The exhibition Universal Cobra: Shuvinai Ashoona and Shary Boyle (2015) included several solo works by each artist, such as Shuvinai’s Composition (Attack of the Tentacle Monsters), as well as exquisite joint drawings, such as InaGodadavida. ACI author and art historian Nancy G. Campbell writes on both of these works in Shuvinai Ashoona: Life & Work.