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Nick and Sheila Pye's life of errors
The landscape between siblings, lovers and sexes becomes a battlefield
exploring power, pain and trust.
Angell Gallery
is presenting Nick
and Sheila Pye’s A Life of Errors as part of the CONTACT
Toronto Photography Festival.
This show, the third solo exhibition by this husband-wife collaborative
team, includes the acclaimed film A Life of Errors, part of a trilogy
of films that the Pyes are developing, and six related photographs.
In the film, the barrier between sister and brother, female and male,
lover and lover, has been removed, and the consequences are deadly. Compelled
beyond reason, the figures wage a war with one another. Perhaps most unsettling
of all, the attacks are executed consensually.
The artists take their married relationship -- generally a taboo subject
matter in contemporary art -- as a point of departure for a metaphoric
foray into power struggles and communication issues between two individuals.
Yet their work retains a dramatic ambiguity about the nature of relationships
such as the seesawing of attraction and repulsion or the adopting of different
gender roles for expediency or manipulation.
An additional emotional complexity is layered onto the narrative by the
identification of the characters as brother and sister. The couple dissects
the boundaries and lays bare the evocative richness of both their co-dependency
and intimacy. The films, and photographs that amplify the filmic project
are disquieting and erotic, melancholic and wry.
Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden assistant curator of contemporary art Kristen Hileman
says, "In their films and photographs, the Pyes explore the troubling
ground where a connection between two people becomes so intense that it
confounds or replaces the human instinct to preserve self."