Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/566702
212 CULTURED hen sculptor Martin Boyce commutes to work from his 1908 Arts-and-Crafts-esque home in Glasgow to his downtown studio in the grand columned 1922 Mercat building—via two short walks and the underground—it's the unremarkable parts of the man-made environment that intrigue him. A pedestrian park bench. A serviceable trash can. A melancholy chain-link fence. Lately, inside his home and his studio, he's been noticing the wall sockets and light switches. In his varied art practice, he often moves into center stage the things that reside in the corner of most people's eyes. "Nobody really knows who designed any of these things, but these un- authored things are everywhere," says Boyce. In the sculptures that he creates with these inspirations, he does something captivating: he defers to the cold, hard substance of urban life while revealing a certain type of poetry. It's an aesthetic approach—an admixture of the coolly considered and the dreamy—that won him the Turner Prize in 2011 and his first solo museum show in the U.S., "When Now is Night," a retrospective opening October 2 at the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island. "Seeing Martin draw on the cultural legacy of concrete, glass and steel and really refine it and create these quite beautiful and elegant sculptural works is really inspiring," says Dominic Molon, the museum's curator of contemporary art. Sometimes, poetry works its way literally into Boyce's works. In one 2003 installation, snippets of a John Donne love poem—"License my roving hands and let them go before, behind, between, above and below"—appear on ventilation grates. The show includes a large-scale, two-room installation, one of which is lined with wallpaper with a black background and a grey and white grid pattern that "conjures up the city at night, the generic metropolis," says Boyce, who grew up in Hamilton, a town of around 50,000 in southern Scotland. The other room spotlights another of the sculptor's major interests: the natural world. Not, however, the unspoiled nature of poets and painters, but the tenacious flora and fauna that gains foothold in the urban environment. Dominating this second space is an enormous spider web made from a grid of harsh fluorescent tubes. In other works over the course of his career, Boyce creates tree-like sculptures from the same unnatural lighting, pointing to the way in which plants in the concrete jungle can appear stripped of their connection to mother earth. "The sort of tension when the built-environment and the natural landscape kind of merge, that point of cross-over, is interesting," says Boyce, who also has a show of new works at Zurich's Galerie Eva Presenhuber, (through October 24), including cast- bronze pieces that incorporate those unremarkable light switches and electrical sockets. "I was thinking about how these objects are kind of the punctuation of architecture, as if you took a paragraph and took all the words out and you were just left with the punctuation," says Boyce. The artist, who received an undergraduate degree and an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, studied for a time in 1996 in the Los Angeles- area at the California Institute of the Arts. There, he started integrating the work of such mid- century modernists as Charles and Ray Eames and Arne Jacobsen, which were originally produced as functional objects but which have gone on to become collectible works of design. He's taken Jacobsen chairs and broken them up, roughly rearranging them into mobiles, and reassembled Eames shelving units in disconcerting ways. This deconstruction, says Boyce, is a way of "thinking about what those objects mean now, rather than what they meant when they were first produced of course. They became about specialist knowledge and taste." Taken together with his pieces inspired by the humdrum, Boyce's output puts into sharp relief what is in many ways an artificial hierarchy of objects, a sort of pecking order of the man- made. "On the one hand certain objects have become very iconic and important historically, whereas these other objects are kind of invisible. They are just kind of stoically, determinedly there. They get rained on, sat on. They just sort of exist, and I find that intriguing." W Taken together with his pieces inspired by the humdrum, Boyce's output puts into sharp relief what is in many ways an artificial hierarchy of objects, a sort of pecking order of the man-made.