Sasha Boyle
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Street Road is thrilled to have had the wonderful Sasha Boyle pioneering a possible artist studio program / residency program on our site. This fall,November 7th, she'll be holding her first open studio day. Please join her and check back here for updates on studio goings on.
Studio Practice:
Sasha Boyle works primarily in oil paint, creating intimate works on canvas. Oil paint, as a traditional medium, lends itself to Boyle’s interrogations of the cultural myths that continually inform self-conceptions of femininity and female sexuality. In paintings such as Claymont Ophelia, Boyle directly references iconic representations of female experience and sexuality, while provocatively combining the image of her own daughter with depictions of environmentally degrading local industry. The painting draws attention to a stereotypical, often exploitative conceptual alignment of the female body with land while making explicit, through its reference to literary fiction, the relationship between fine art and other forms of cultural production. Art historical precedents such as Surrealism and early Flemish landscape/genre painting permeate and inform Boyle’s work, similarly evincing an interest in the effects of culture on the individual. Through the inclusion of varied, incongruous motifs in her dreamlike paintings, Boyle comments upon the concept of individuality in art, epitomized by early modern movements such as Surrealism. By incorporating the image of her young daughter in such evocative works, Boyle engages with the movement’s misogynistic concept of woman-as-muse, interrogating her own complex experience as a woman, mother, and inheritor of an insidiously patriarchal artistic tradition. Boyle’s artistic practice demonstrates an acute awareness of its contexts, a direct and compelling dialogue with the culture that structures her life and art. Sasha Boyle Personal Statement: My current work represents musings on the resiliency of one’s spirit. These musings are manifest in layers of oil paint on canvas that communicate parallel experiences, simultaneously complexly primal and sophistically simple. This visual novel is an imagined world, preserving memories and emotional resonances with cultural landscapes, particularly those tied to the fabric of a woman’s experiences through large-scale epic adventures on this good earth. I am playing with the idea scale as a means to reinterpret events that are remembered in the energies in and around us. Stories are revealed in vibrant color with varying chroma, narrated with interconnecting lines. These visual stories are constructed from actual experiences, but the viewer is encouraged to interact with the idea that memories are perhaps a universal footprint that resonates within all of us through the shared human experience. |
Sasha on working at Street Road:
Street Road has been an integral presence in my pursuing and developing my studio practice. It has given me the literal physical space and more ethereal psychic space to reconnect with the seriousness of my artistic purpose. Street Road is a powerful and significant creative force in the area; it offers highly professional, drama free but casual artistic synergy. In some ways, my work has unintentionally absorbed some of the concepts set out at Street Road, relating to the thoughts and investigations surrounding property and ownership. In my case, it is related to the thought that an artist owns their creative flow as if it were property to be exploited. If my artistic thoughts go to that level of greed, the creative flow dries and evaporates, leaving a cracked dusty former riverbed in the deep desert of a creative block. The geographical location of Street Road is rich in inspiration and resources to recharge the artistic spirit. My favorites have been Longwood Gardens (including their awesome library), Chatham Diner, The Whip Tavern and Chester County Solid Waste Authority--aka the dump. I will take with me the list of studio rules I created at Street Road and I can only hope to add to it , or not, over time. 
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