The Illuminations Project showcases feminism

“THEY WERE FEMINIST AS F---” reads the very last line of The Illuminations Project, an exceptionally wordy words-and-pictures collaboration between Shary Boyle and Emily Vey Duke currently at Oakville Galleries, and it could just as well be the alternate title of the whole darn thing.

That should come as no surprise, given the collaborators: Boyle (pictures), with her frank, fantastical and occasionally grisly drawings and sculpture and Vey Duke (words), through her decidedly more conceptual frame, have always viewed the world in a women-first kind of way.

Even less surprising, despite their different ways of making art, is their close kinship here. The Illuminations Project is the product of a decade long back-and-forth that has produced works alarming, potent, wry and wholly engaging.

Here’s how it came to be: A dozen or so years ago, Vey Duke sent Boyle a snippet of poetic fiction. Boyle recast it as a drawing, but kept it secret; she then made another drawing and sent it back to Vey Duke for her written interpretation. In turn, Vey Duke wrote a text to accompany the image, stowed it away, and wrote a new one.

On it went, over the years, until 31 matched pairs emerged as a fully-formed body of work. Oakville Galleries is showing it for the first time, but not the last: A cross-country tour is in the works, with possible dates south of the border as well.

The Illuminations Project will also be produced as a book, which is as wise as it is necessary: There’s a ton of reading to be done here, some of it oblique, much of it crisp with dry wit, and all of it loosely pinned to a narrative thread that runs through its 31 episodes.

Loosely is the key word: Boyle and Vey Duke explore dark corners of the psyche partially through a storyline involving Bloodie, a girl in the bloom of young womanhood (I’ll leave you to connect the dots on that one) and her occasional encounters with Peg Leg and his band of wild boys.

While it’s not wrong to see The Illuminations Project as an allegorical epic in the age-old tradition of such things (Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, with the symbolic purity of Una and her travels through perilous lands accompanied by the Red Cross Knight comes to mind) it’s not quite so explicitly instructive.

Bloodie’s various misadventures are punctuated with departures into darker realms, where the perils of modern life more generally come into viscerally sharp focus. In one pairing titled “I want to be afraid of nature,” Vey Duke posits that “Today we see nature as a precious chamois-rag with the capacity to mop up a limited amount of the toxic filth produced by culture.”

She, of course, lets us know what she thinks about the essential purity of nature in her title, and Boyle follows suit: Hanging next to it, a pack of lions, wolves and rats feast on the naked corpse of a young girl under a steel-blue sky in a denuded forest.

It’s all of a very Boyle-ish piece, and the kind of thing the Toronto-based artist has ridden to a very prominent career, which landed her at the Venice Biennale 18 months ago as Canada’s very official artist-emissary. Dark fantasy, viscerality, and a certain carnal, consumptive sensibility unafraid of the darker side of human nature are all elements of her work, and Vey Duke, with her gleefully macabre and pithy texts, makes an able foil.

The installation, meanwhile, is pitch-perfect. The gallery space is darkened, the pieces spot-lit, either on the walls or in vitrines, bestowing upon them an otherworldly, quasi-religious or mythical quality.

For all the reading to be done here, the show has remarkable physical presence; as much sense as a collected volume will make, it makes as much sense as a show. Boyle’s drawings are, as ever, gutsy, exuberant things, exultant in colour and in bizarrely transmogrified figures and forms.

Women rule here, and it comes clear that Shary Boyle and Vey Duke’s feminism is not merely intellectualized, but a powerfully visceral thing: A woman lies splayed, naked on the back of a stag, gorging on a birthday cake, immolating her lover, who is obscured by icing and flame; naked girls mounted on wild dogs and hunting in packs, with their quarry — God, the ultimate patriarch — tied to a rickety tree.

Circling the gallery to the final diptych, we achieve resolution. Bloodie and Peg Leg, embroiled in a love-hate relationship throughout, achieve their Ithaca in a protected glade. Together at last, they care for woodland creatures and live off the land, growing closer and closer to it. Eventually, they die, and their earthy corpses spawn a race of tiny forest-folk who devour their remains as a means to thrive.

It appears as a gently environmentalist version of immaculate conception — birth without sex, without pain, achieved in equal measure by man and woman — and it brings us to that last line: THEY WERE FEMINIST AS F---. It’s not about the artists, but the progenitors of this new race, worshipful of their forbears’ reconciled, gender-equitable ways.

Did we mention that The Illuminations Project reads as epic mythology? Given the events in the news this week, that’s even more sad, and more true. The Illuminations Project, in its macabre, fantastical way, is a genuine stab at enlightenment, even as the darkness seems to gather ever more near.