Kevin Jon Boyle
dal 30/1/2004 al 16/5/2004
Segnalato da
30/1/2004
Kevin Jon Boyle
UCR California Museum of Photography, Riverside
A comprehensive exhibition highlighting the breadth and depth of the late artist's work. Curated by photographer Doug McCulloh, this exhibition features Boyle's explorations in early performance art through to his experimentation in the media of painting, poetry, and photography.
BIG PICTURE a retrospective
Opening reception January 31, 2004, 6-9pm
The California Museum of Photography presents Kevin Jon Boyle : BIG
PICTURE a retrospective, a comprehensive exhibition highlighting the breadth
and depth of the late artist's work. Curated by photographer Doug McCulloh,
this exhibition features Boyle's explorations in early performance art
through to his experimentation in the media of painting, poetry, and
photography. To complement this exhibition, the show will also feature a new
film on Boyle's life and his art, produced by his daughter Jessica. The
exhibition debuts at the CMP with an opening reception at 6pm on January 31,
2004 and closes on May 16, 2004.
Kevin Boyle's embrace of the Californian lifestyle helped shape his
philosophy. Boyle was intolerant of art world puffery, posing, and hype.
Instead, Boyle preferred complex tales of surfing experiences and personal
accounts of simply living. Nonetheless, Boyle was a ceaseless and relentless
maker of art. His large body of work that included visual art and
performances, exhibition design, and curatorial undertakings were united in
the idea that the commonplace and the miraculous have an intimate
relationship and that viewed at certain angles and in a certain light, they
become one.
Boyle's artwork is a reflection of a transmutation of his wide-eyed
toughness into uncompromising images, beautiful perhaps, but often elusive,
eerie, or unsettling. His vivid and perplexing cibachrome photographs
produced in the 1980s illustrate his captivation with performative objects
as they act as a documented moments; artifacts of events staged to
photograph and laden with a personal semiology of gestures and icons. The
cast of characters remain anonymous and mysterious, their ghosts and
reflections making cameos through the lens. Boyle manipulated the camera to
accommodate the production of his performances by locking open the lens for
seconds or minutes while he zig-zagged through the darkened set, carrying a
flash and colored gels. We see a complex conversation with the early
photographs of Lucas Samaras, who Boyle met in New York. Layering the images
with time, multiple viewpoints, appearances and disappearances, visions, and
elisions, these photographs abandon the privileged single view. Before the
heyday of Photoshop, these images are superimpositions produced by the
creativity of the camera and the use of theatrical and lighting legerdemain.
The products of Boyle's use of the camera as both image manipulator and
video camera retain the power to astonish us.
In addition to his cibachromes, Boyle's extensive body of work form
their own vital and intrinsic worlds. In one fashion or another, these
worlds embody California's master dialectic of sunshine and noir. His
collage series plucks images from the everyday Ânewspaper clippings, vintage
and old photographs‹and reinterprets them with the insertion of words,
scribble, sketches, and targets. His square paintings and stipple heads
display Boyle's keen interest in the intersection of the visual arts and
poetry, and another highlight of the show, the magnified personal ads,
flavor the exhibition with a pop sensibility that was apparent in Boyle's
humor. Viewing the quirky and wryly imagery in these pieces, we discern a
discussion with his friend William Wegman about melding high and low culture
in the manufacture of the layered narrative.
Kevin Boyle's contributions to the California Museum of Photography can
be measured by his relationship with the museum. Boyle joined the CMP in
1987 and worked with architect Stanley Saitowitz in the conception of the
elegant exhibition spaces of the museum. Boyle also served as Curator of
Exhibitions from 1992 until his death in 2002, having had curated such
popular and acclaimed exhibitions as Rearview Mirror: Automobile Images and
American Identities and Ocean View: The Depiction of Southern California
Coastal Lifestyle that focused on themes of California and popular culture.
As the first retrospective of Boyle's work, this exhibition is a tribute to
his considerable accomplishments as an artist and his impact on the museum
and the local community.
About the Artist
Kevin Jon Boyle was born in Sapulpa, Oklahoma in 1951 and lived in Southern
California and New York City. He received his Bachelor's of Fine Arts and
Master's of Fine Arts from California State University at Long Beach. He had
significant showings of paintings, photographs, performances and video
installations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, New York, and Paris.
He served as exhibition designer and installation consultant for many years
to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Fisher Galleries at
the University of Southern California, and the Skirball Museum in Los
Angeles. For ten years he was Curator of Exhibitons at UCR/California Museum
of Photography. Boyle died in March, 2002 after a prolonged battle with
metastatic melanoma, a virulent form of skin cancer.
Generous contributions to this exhibition and accompanying events have been
made by Henry Coil, Jr.
In the image: 'Surf Where You Live II', 2001.
Open to: Public, $1 general admission, free to all students, staff, and seniors
--
Linda Theung, Public Relations Coordinator
UCR/California Museum of Photography
909-787-5017
UCR / California Museum of Photography
3824 Main Street, Riverside, CA 92501