This fall, the U of M’s School of Art Gallery is showcasing the work of Sheila Butler, an American Canadian painter whose work explores themes such as gender, narrative and transformation through paintings of human bodies in motion.
The exhibition, cryptically entitled Other Circumstances, features Butler’s work from as early as the 1970s. Upon walking into the gallery, visitors will see walls decorated with paintings of spectral, often faceless figures swimming, flying and falling across canvases. In the centre, the installation “Essential Tremor” — an approximately 22-metre-long translucent fabric painted with bodies, hands and faces — hangs from the ceiling, quivering slightly in the air.
In addition to her signature dynamic figures, Butler’s paintings also prominently feature water, symbolizing transitions between realms. The characters fall into or emerge from swimming pools, oceans or streams, with their bodies slightly distorted beneath the water’s wavering surface.
Some of her paintings are also gendered retellings of classical myths and stories from renowned works of literature. “Female Icarus,” for example, draws inspiration from the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun while escaping captivity. His wax and feather wings melted under the sun’s heat, causing him to plunge into the ocean. Butler’s version reimagines Icarus as a woman, now equipped with a modern parachute and the ability to swim.
“Ophelia,” inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, portrays the famous scene of the young woman drowning in a river after her father had been killed. “Ophelia” has been a subject of fascination for many artists over the years, with Sir John Everett Millais’s 1852 painting being the most famous rendition. Butler paints her with a ghostly hand near her head, as if to stop her from sinking into the murky waters while hazy figures of a man and a woman appear next to her.
Blair Fornwald, director and curator at the U of M’s School of Art Gallery, commented that Butler’s choice of medium and subject matter makes her work unique and compelling.
“Sheila Butler is a really interesting figurative artist who has a longstanding interest in the body and depictions of emotional or psychological spaces that I think would be difficult to represent in any other way but drawing and painting,” she said.
It is not always easy to tell what is happening in the paintings because of their spectral quality, but Fornwald highlighted that Butler’s art champions in how it creates an almost recognizable but ultimately dream-like quality that defies real world logic.
“I think she creates really kind of fantastic and complex narratives and really unusual spaces. Her figures and the spaces that they kind of float in, they feel, kind of both real and not real, and kind of familiar and strange. I guess I like the way she kind of incorporates dream logic into her work — you know the way that dreams kind of suggest a narrative, but the narrative doesn’t really hold together.”
Building on the exhibition, the gallery also hosted two community engagement events on campus — a panel discussion with the exhibit’s co-curators, Pamela Edmonds and Patrick Mahon, along with school of art professor Suzie Smith — in September. Also, there was a gallery tour by Fornwald and a live figure drawing session featuring local dancer Carol-Ann Bohrn last week.
Other Circumstances will conclude on Oct. 26, 2024. Visit umanitoba.ca/art/other-circumstances to learn more about Butler, the exhibition and its co-curators.