Martin Boyce, 2008

21 October - 30 November 2008, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Alumni Courtyard. A Kaldor Art Project in conjunction with RMIT.

Martin Boyce (b.1967, lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland) takes as a starting point for his work iconic Modernist designs and forms, reinventing them as autonomous sculptures that he brings together in atmospheric installations. Eerie public spaces such as disused playgrounds, forlorn parks, freeway under-passes and subways are recalled in his work, as are the structures and surfaces – fences, benches, telephone booths, street lamps, grates – that mediate our experience of the urban landscape. In sculptural installations and public art works, Boyce explores the poetry of such spaces located between nature and architecture, through the various strata of the city – populated and un-inhabited, functioning and abandoned.

Boyce has chosen the historically rich RMIT University (previously Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) Alumni Courtyard as the site for his Kaldor Public Art Project. This rare inner city outdoor space will become an oasis of palm trees constructed from the same geometric element that has appeared in many of Boyce’s recent projects. This form has its source in concrete trees created by Joël and Jan Martel for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Boyce has taken this geometric element, re-modeled and expanded its application, as the basis for the three tall palms, intersected by a number of constructed elements – an imposing screen/barrier, winding hose, rubbish bins and a drain grate.

Made from industrial materials but estranged from their usual function or salvaged from impending obsolescence, Boyce’s sculptural objects are a play between the figurative and abstract. The warping and folding of the forms as well as their stripped-back, weathered appearance suggests the effects of time or an unknown event. An analogy can be drawn between Boyce’s dream-scapes, and the idyllic landscape tradition featuring buildings in ruins and encroaching nature. His sculptural arrangements create a similar ‘out of time’ mise-en-scene of narrative fragments.

As one writer aptly describes his work: ‘The disquieting balance of opposites, of intimacy and distance, interior and exterior, beauty and tension within his installations seems to amplify the un-locatable anxiety, paranoia and dysfunction in contemporary cities at the same time as it encourages an almost nostalgic reverie’. (http://www.bard.edu/ccs/exhibitions/museum/sodiumdreams/artists/boyce/)

Boyce has exhibited extensively internationally including in the Sculpture Projects Muenster 2007; New York's New Museum's inaugural exhibition Un-monumental: the object in the 21st century, 2007; Out Of This Sun, Into This Shadow, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2008; We Burn, We Shiver (with Ugo Rondinone), Sculptural Centre, New York, 2008.

He has been selected to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2009.