Katherine Boyer
How the Sky Carries the Sun

Towering over the centre of the room, two large, prism-like wooden structures held a moose-hide vest up by the shoulders. Like wings, the structures pressed down on the ground, lifting up the vest and the beaded prairie landscape and sky on the garment. Gathered around the feet of the installation, puffy boxes made from leather fabric and cotton batting sat open, empty, and crumpled. The blue in the boxes’ faux leather fabric resembled the colour of the sky; their puffy shapes suggested clouds.

The mental impression above is of the two works The Sky Vest and Heavy/Soft (both 2021) from Katherine Boyer’s latest exhibition at the Art Gallery of Regina. Boyer, a Métis/settler multidisciplinary artist, has been making art to explore personal family stories, Métis history, and material culture, as well as how these domains interact, intertwine, and manifest. In the exhibition How the Sky Carries the Sun, she examines selfhood as a queer and as a Métis individual, expressing the dichotomy of identity through the repeating symbols of the sun and the sky in a diverse series of works that materially straddle “soft” and “hard.”