Excerpt from
Uses of Enchantment

This month marks the third anniversary of the opening of Uses of Enchantment: Art and Environmentalism at the McMichael. The exhibition took its title from the classic 1976 study by the Austrian psychologist and scholar Bruno Bettelheim, who posited that fairy tales provide for children an imaginative space in which to process their deepest fears and dread. Borrowing this paradigm, the curator Sarah Milroy pulled together contributions by seven artists—Shary Boyle, Carrie Allison, Shuvinai Ashoona, Qavavau Manumie, Bill Burns, Sara Angelucci, and Winnie Truong—who register their experience of our rapidly changing natural world in ways that intrigue, caution, and entrance. Taking our contemporary experience of climate change, species and habitat loss, and environmental degradation, these artists channel their imaginations to reflect on the place we find ourselves in as planet Earth’s rogue species.   

In addition to its inclusion in Uses of Enchantment, Shary Boyle’s sculpture The Warming, 2018–21, was acquired for the McMichael collection, and it is currently on display in our current exhibition Fresh Air: New Acquisitions in Context, as is her painting Silkworm, for AY (Highland Series), 2007. In recognition of this occasion, we are sharing an excerpt from an essay by Ruth Jones, a Toronto writer and editor, about Shary Boyle from the Uses of Enchantment catalogue:  

          It’s easy to look at Boyle’s red skies and flames and see the end of the world. In Our Private Apocalypse, 2007, a naked couple, the woman pregnant, perch on a Stonehenge lintel watching as a lava lake forms below them, Jupiter’s storm swirling like a giant eye above. The flood that soaked Paris in 2016 was not quite high enough to force the evacuation of the Louvre’s Winged Victory of Samothrace—which we see floating by in The Great Flood, 2016—but a special storage facility in Liévin, a town two hundred kilometres to the north, is ready just in case.7 Wildfires have made red skies familiar, and Nunavut continues to debate the risks of offshore oil development as sea ice retreats and naturally occurring oil slicks bubble up temptingly from the deep.1 

          In 1965, Susan Sontag wrote in “The Imagination of Disaster,” her essay on science fiction films, that fantasy has the capacity “to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors, real or anticipated” while also normalizing “what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it.” In the half century before Sontag’s essay was written, Wikipedia lists 28 apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic movies. For the brief period from 2010 to 2019, however, the total is 107. It is fair to say we are surrounded. Our terrors are many, and we are unlikely to wake up to a solution. These movies can start to feel like practice drills.  

          And so we contemplate the apocalypse, in all its eerie and enchanting configurations. As one mermaid prostrates herself beside the severed head of a narwhal in Universal Cobra Pussy, 2011, two others look up to where four crossed tusks are calling down a star from the worlds Boyle’s collaborator here, Shuvinai Ashoona, has drawn into the sky above them. The world may very well be ending, but as it cracks open, the strangest things come crawling through. A bat—that tiny, furred augur of environmental catastrophe—grows lacy wings, or emerges from layers of elaborate ruffles, its countenance a fantastical exaggeration of the sensitive folds of the proboscis that allows it to sound out the dark. What does it sense approaching? 

1. Jim Bell, “Thousands of Barrels of Oil Ooze Naturally into Nunavut Waters,” Nunatsiaq News, October 19, 2012, nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674thousands_of_barrels_of_oil_ooze_naturally_into_nunavut_waters/
Tim McSorley, “Baffin Island Communities Unanimously Opposed to Offshore Oil Exploration,” The Narwhal, March 28, 2014, thenarwhal.ca/baffin-island-communities-opposed-offshore-oil-exploration/
Krestia DeGeorge, “A New Report Predicts What Nunavut Offshore Drilling Might Look Like,” Arctic Today, October 11, 2018, arctictoday.com/newreport-predicts-nunavut-offshore-drilling-might-look-like/
Jim Bell, “Nunavut’s Not Ready for Oil and Gas Development,”  Nunatsiaq News, March 20, 2019, nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/nunavuts-not-ready-for-oil-and-gas-development/.