Our love is like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours
2003 - Installation (Installation)
Martin Boyce
In the installation Our Love is like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, Martin Boyce uses common elements from public gardens – trees, benches, trashbins– in a game which describes at once a social space and an abstract dream space. The trees, unique sources of light in the exhibition space, produce their own environment. These sculptures, as if extracted from a set, are enough to suggest an atmosphere, a landscape, or a movie. Their nocturnal depiction is ambivalent, hovering between poetic beauty and the potential threat of a park at night. Romantic views of nature blend with modern ideas of optimism and equality. However, from it emerges from a deep anxiety or paranoia. The perceived space cannot be localized inside a certain reality, rather it pertains to the everyone’s imagination. Therefore, in the installation, the viewer produces what he sees around him with his own eyes and own journey through the space. Its space becomes the psychological and emotional space of an idler. When describing the piece, Boyce has stated that the sculptures move far from the visible and the material generating more of an emotional state rather than theoretical reflection. “My installations draw upon imaginary and fragmented landscapes. When I introduce an object within an installation, it recalls the world from where it is derived from, like a fragment, it is a exploded variation.” The universe of Martin Boyce is multifarious, extracting fragments of reference as varied as architecture, design, cinema, Scottish literature, Japanese poetry, etc. His forms do not fit perfectly within one category and exist more as ghosts of meaning. For instance, a sculpture can distinctly resemble a tilted ping-pong table although all the elements deviate from such a table to a great extent. Concrete trees by Joel and Jan Martel made in 1925 for the Decorative Arts Exhibition in Paris are a recurrent theme throughout the work of Boyce, as well as replicas in “Electric trees and telephone booth” (2006) and formal traces in works such as “We are still and reflective” (2007). The artist sees these objects as a perfect “collapse” between architecture and nature. The sculptures, consisting of trees, gates, vents, signs, dot the exhibition space, becoming a stage. While the forms and materials from were conceived to be functional, Martin Boyce uses them less as objects of representation and more as objects of emotion. Their titles, extracted from fragments of poems, pop songs, slogans, exist as a way to “inhabit” the installations and poeticize the real.
“My installations draw upon imaginary and fragmented landscapes. When I introduce an object within an installation, it recalls the world from where it is derived from, like a fragment, it is a exploded variation.” The universe of Martin Boyce is multifarious, extracting fragments of reference as varied as architecture, design, cinema, Scottish literature, Japanese poetry, etc. His forms do not fit perfectly within one category and exist more as ghosts of meaning. For instance, a sculpture can distinctly resemble a tilted ping-pong table although all the elements deviate from such a table to a great extent. Concrete trees by Joel and Jan Martel made in 1925 for the Decorative Arts Exhibition in Paris are a recurrent theme throughout the work of Boyce, as well as replicas in Electric trees and telephone booth (2006) and formal traces in works such as We are still and reflective (2007). The artist sees these objects as a perfect “collapse” between architecture and nature. The sculptures, consisting of trees, gates, vents, signs, dot the exhibition space, becoming a stage. While the forms and materials from were conceived to be functional, Martin Boyce uses them less as objects of representation and more as objects of emotion. Their titles, extracted from fragments of poems, pop songs, slogans, exist as a way to “inhabit” the installations and poeticize the real. Martin Boyce was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1967 where he lives and works today.
Colors:
Related works of genres: » scottish contemporary artists
» see more
© » KADIST
Andrew Grassie
2009In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...
© » KADIST
Douglas Gordon
1996In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
© » KADIST
Charles Avery
2012Since 2005, Charles Avery has devoted his practice to the perpetual description of a fictional island...
Related works featuring themes of: » British
» see more
© » KADIST
Keith Tyson
The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence...
© » KADIST
Ryan Gander
2012Epiphany…learnt through hardship is composed of a bronze sculpture depicting the model of the little dancer of Degas, in the pose of a female nude photographed by Edward Weston (Nude, 1936) accompanied by a blue cube...
© » KADIST
Cerith Wyn Evans
2008Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
© » KADIST
Simon Starling
2007Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
Keith Tyson
The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence...
© » KADIST
Ryan Gander
2012Epiphany…learnt through hardship is composed of a bronze sculpture depicting the model of the little dancer of Degas, in the pose of a female nude photographed by Edward Weston (Nude, 1936) accompanied by a blue cube...
© » KADIST
Ian Wallace
1986Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » KADIST
Shimabuku
2006For the two-channel work Asking the Repentistas – Peneira & Sonhador – to remix my octopus works Shimabuku asked two Brazilian street singers to compose a ballad about his previous works with octopi (in which he created traditional Japanese ceramic vessels to catch octopi, with a fisherman who took him on his boat to test them out as we can see on one of the channel)...
© » SFMOMA OPENSPACE
What’s an Amateur, Anyway? : Open Space November 17, 2021 What’s an Amateur, Anyway? by Poetry Collaborations with Creative Growth Eds note: The prose in this post was written by Creative Growth Poet-in-Residence Lorraine Lupo Heather Edgar, Untitled, 18″x24″ acrylic on paper I like to proselytize to any non-poet who will listen...
© » KADIST
Chen Chieh-Jen
2010Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Related works from the » 2000's created around » Hamilton, United Kingdom
» see more
© » KADIST
Martin Creed
2003This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...
© » KADIST
Alexandre da Cunha
2005His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs...
© » KADIST
Fred Wilson
2009Fred Wilson’s flag paintings document the 20th century history of African people, indexing the period of liberation from colonialism...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » ART AND CAKE
Art of the Joshua Tree – Art and Cake October 30, 2023 October 30, 2023 Author Art of the Joshua Tree Sossi Madzounian Deserts Ikebana , Photography Charity: Center for Biological Diversity Karin Lindeberg Frida, I see you under the shady tree , 35mm Photography 8×10 inches Charity: Center for Biological Diversity Chloe Allred, Dreaming in Cerulean and Quinacridone , Oil Paint on Canvas...
© » ART AND CAKE
Art of the Joshua Tree – Art and Cake October 30, 2023 October 30, 2023 Author Art of the Joshua Tree Sossi Madzounian Deserts Ikebana , Photography Charity: Center for Biological Diversity Karin Lindeberg Frida, I see you under the shady tree , 35mm Photography 8×10 inches Charity: Center for Biological Diversity Chloe Allred, Dreaming in Cerulean and Quinacridone , Oil Paint on Canvas...
© » ART AND CAKE
Art of the Joshua Tree – Art and Cake October 30, 2023 October 30, 2023 Author Art of the Joshua Tree Sossi Madzounian Deserts Ikebana , Photography Charity: Center for Biological Diversity Karin Lindeberg Frida, I see you under the shady tree , 35mm Photography 8×10 inches Charity: Center for Biological Diversity Chloe Allred, Dreaming in Cerulean and Quinacridone , Oil Paint on Canvas...
