Joyce Wieland, a Tragicomic Canadian, Offered Cues to Live Larger

Joyce Wieland, a Tragicomic Canadian, Offered Cues to Live Larger

“I wasn’t going to check my sense of humor, my idea of color, at the door for a bunch of people who lived by theory alone,” Joyce Wieland said in a 1987 documentary of her life, Kay Armitage’s Artist on Fire. “I didn’t want to live in a world that they would create.” So in response to grey gloom, the late artist, born in Toronto in 1930, offered up pastels, instilling in her viewer the sense that one can dissolve, play around, and build again.…