#newbridge project

Newbridge Books Cassette Party

Newbridge Books are hosting a party celebrating cassette music culture from around the world as part of this year’s Late Shows - more info here - and Good Food is very happy to be involved! We will have tapes on sale, and alright lover will be playing live (Pentecostal Party and Zassō Fūkei also playing).

NO SLEEP TILL ZAGREB Friday 12 April 2013 / 18.30 / Free Drop-in / No booking required facebook event page: http://on.fb.me/16I46z4 The NewBridge Project Space 16 New Bridge St West, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8AW

A post-symposium event presented by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in collaboration with Northumbria University to complement the symposium, Revisiting Form: Architecture, Socialism, Modernism

Published in Canned Magazine Vol 2. (http://cannedmagazine.com/) 

In the last three years Martin Boyce has proved to be one of the most inventive and internationally recognised practising British sculptors. The breakthrough point perhaps was representing Scotland in the Venice Biennale 2009. This, followed by a series of national and international shows and moreover his nomination for the Turner Prize, has secured his reputation as one of the UK’s most prominent artists.

Perhaps the single biggest influence on the work of Boyce in recent years is a photograph of Jan and Joel Martel’s concrete sculptures exhibited as part of the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, 1925. In this highly modernist take on natural form, the Martel brothers dismantle the aesthetic of a tree into its simplest building blocks, core shapes and angles creating sculptures that Boyce sees as “the perfect collapse of architecture and nature.” These ‘cubist trees’ have in turn formed the basis for almost all of Boyce’s recent works. The concrete sculptures themselves are deconstructed, reconfigured, designed into a literal alphabet that Boyce uses to construct his own visual language. The forms and letters created by analysing this design structure then manifest in many aspects of Boyce’s complex practice, peppered throughout his prints, applied directly to the wall and forming a structural element of his sculpture works.

 Boyce describes the creation of his typography as being a trial and error outcome from repeatedly breaking down the core structure of the Martel trees. After configuring each letter the decision was made that each should appear in its original ‘Martel-esque’ orientation (some manifested on their side or at varying angles) determining that as phrases were written they appeared to be tumbling down. Boyce saw this falling alphabet as a complimentary representation of leaves carried by the wind, echoing back to the ‘trees’ from which they take their origin, the notion of seasonal change and of breeze carried through abandoned or disused architectural spaces.

Boyce’s typography can be seen in pure form in print works such as Untitled (Concrete Leaves) and Untitled (Electric Trees) and in designs of layered texts such as Untitled (Concrete Trees repeat). It was through this layering that grid-like formations appeared which Boyce began transposing into 3D sculptural works, the first of which being For 1925 Avenue d’Automne (2005) a free-standing ‘fence’ composed of the gridded Martel text. Other architectural features such as ventilation grills, lamps and tables have since been sculpturally re-imagined in Boyce’s custom typography. As such Boyce has created his own system of creation, taking modernist heavyweights such as Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouve and Arne Jacobsen and using the modernist design code inherent in their work as a vehicle for his own, deconstructing and then reforming their cult status designs with his Martel inspired additions.

Boyce’s sculptural works can be looked upon individually but more often than not are presented in a manner whereby they can be read as one. Together they form tableaux resembling dystopian, abandoned public spaces: playgrounds (as seen in the climbing frame-like central piece of Concrete Leaves), derelict Palozzos (his site-specific response in his work for the Venice Biennale 2009) and libraries (as seen in A Library of Leaves – the exhibition for which he was nominated for the Turner Prize). By evoking these recognisable yet abandoned public spaces, Boyce creates a somewhat eerie atmosphere in which it’s all a little too quiet.  The sculptural elements that come together to form these environments are created with human scale in mind, the cult design references adding an odd sense of familiarity. The viewer is placed at the centre of a situation that may feel simultaneously real and constructed, timeless in that it could represent a lost past or a derelict future.

As mentioned, the exhibition that left a lasting impression on the Turner Prize judges was A Library of Leaves (2010) presented at the Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich. The two centrepieces to this exhibition were Boyce’s re-imaginings of Jean Prouvé’s modernist designs for a library table. The basic form and scale of the Prouvé tables were kept but incorporated into them were panels from the concrete trees and surfaces comprised of Boyce’s custom text. The ‘library’ in the title can be seen as a direct reference to the Prouvé design, to the appearance of the exhibition as an abandoned public library space and to the literary structures of Boyce’s sculptural works, which in their alphabetical make-up can literally be ‘read’. It also physically acts as a library and archive of Boyce’s use of the Martel trees, placing the table sculptures alongside wall mounted text and photography.

Since Boyce’s rediscovery of the Martel Trees in 2005, many of his exhibitions and pieces have titles referencing distinctly autumnal themes – Concrete Trees, Broken Fall (That Blows through Concrete Leaves), Our Breath and This Breeze, Concrete Autumn. Autumn perhaps more than any other season can be seen as synonymous with change, new beginnings and metamorphosis. In relation to this, throughout his complex practice Boyce questions the effect of time and subsequent change on objects, and as a whole his sculptural installations come to represent frozen moments of perpetually changing urban environments. Much like the original black and white photograph of the Martel trees that so much of his current practice stems from; Boyce’s works themselves are timeless and beautifully designed. They offer the viewer a chance to experience a snap shot of time in abandoned environments whose subtle transience would otherwise pass by unnoticed.