Ontario Culture Days 2025 Creative in Residence: Shary Boyle

Detail of The Sleeper, courtesy of Shary Boyle

Shary Boyle: The Sleeper – What keeps you up at night?

September 19 – October 12, 2025
Oakville, ON
onculturedays.ca

Ontario Culture Days is your invitation to connect, discover, and celebrate arts and culture in your community. Under the thematic banner The Shape of Memory, this year’s eight Creatives in Residence projects explore themes that include ritual, dreams, ecological interdependence, migration, and cultural histories, through diverse mediums and evocative visual language.

Creative in Residence Shary Boyle will debut The Sleeper – What keeps you up at night?, a powerful project centred on themes of communal healing.

Shary Boyle’s large-scale effigy sculpture embodying insomnia, The Sleeper, will be installed in an upstairs bedroom of the colonial Erchless Estate at Oakville Museum. An accompanying poster asks viewers a simple question: “What keeps you up at night?” Visitors will be invited to write down their fears and place them inside the hollow chest of this silent listener.

Detail of The Sleeper, courtesy of Shary Boyle

Satellite stations will run concurrently in nearby libraries and community centres, inviting others to participate by answering the same question. These satellite receptacles will be gathered and brought to the Erchless Estate for the project’s completion, when Boyle will bury the sculpture with all the community concerns it contains. To complete the cycle of transformation and close the ritual, a “Moon Garden” (most beautiful at night) of white flowering spring bulbs will be planted on top of the burial site. This garden can be visited by the public in spring 2026. As climate, economic, and political threats course through our days and nights, The Sleeper proposes an offline ritual to collectively unburden and transform our private concerns.

Shary Boyle: The Sleeper – What keeps you up at night?
September 19 – October 12, 2025
Erchless Estate at Oakville Museum, Oakville
Free | Learn more

Shary Boyle’s The Sleeper Ballot Boxes
September 19 – October 12, 2025
Multiple locations, Oakville
Free | Learn more

Produced by Ontario Culture Days in partnership with the Town of Oakville and the Oakville Museum.

About Ontario Culture Days

Ontario Culture Days invites you to join the celebration! Attend, connect, and participate in free events, workshops, performances, and exhibitions in more than 150 communities, and 16 official festival hubs, throughout the province. Ontario Culture Days is supported by the Government of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, Government of Ontario, Ontario Arts Council, Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG), EQ Bank, the Toronto Star, Le Clos Jordanne, Destination Northern Ontario, and VIA Rail.

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