.The Pye Effect.

The first time I saw this outstanding couple and their achievements I was immediately struck dumb by their impressive and spectacular relationship with each other and their art.Simply brilliant. I must say...I envy them.

Nick and Sheila Pye’s marriage is hell—if their art is anything to go by, that is. The Toronto-based couple’s photographs and films, in which they are the sole performers, portray a series of elemental, absurdist tugs-of-war. Often confined to such claustrophobic spaces as bathroom stalls, the Pyes struggle persistently and wordlessly to unite—in order, perhaps, to make amends, have sex or simply tear each other limb from limb.

In their latest exhibition, A Life of Errors, the pair continues the epic battle; even the gallery itself is divided, one half showing the titular film, the other a sequence of nine photographs, most of which are set in a Gothic house full of peeling wallpaper and creaky floorboards. Fire, in some form, is a running theme. In certain photos, it dances across the frame as a herald of destruction; in the film, the husband places the wife in a ring of fire and forces her to jump rope, blindfolded.



Silent Flurry, shown here, has Sheila sending baking powder into Nick’s face—a perversion of the blown kiss, in which her expectant lover is seemingly reduced to a puff of smoke.

















The Paper Wall by Nick and Sheila Pye: