Justin Boyd: Dubforms

In his site-specific exhibition, San Antonio-based artist Justin Boyd rearticulates the space of The Arcade by responding to its most striking element: a pair of floor-to-ceiling bay windows.

Boyd often takes a multidisciplinary approach to exploring uncharted territories. His past work includes sculpture, performance, sound, and video, and at times he combines all of these elements to create ambitious large-scale environments. His solo exhibition Dubforms references his history of experimentation and exemplifies the intuitive and site-specific nature of his practice. For the VAC, Boyd rearticulates the space of The Arcade by responding to its most striking element: a pair of floor-to-ceiling bay windows. By creating two separate site-derived sculptural augmentations, Boyd explores the interstitial space of The Arcade by morphing its geometry into something unfamiliar.

By employing two different sculptural strategies, one generating from the right side of the windows and the other starting from the left bank of windows, Boyd creates new geometric amalgamations based on the window space that highlight their duality. For example, the right side of his installation will contrast the transparency of the windows with solid forms. However, the left will be made of mirrored plate glass, which reflects the right side’s form and carries this “solid” image all the way through the left side of the gallery. The Arcade is highly symmetrical, but through this repositioning of its intrinsic forms, Boyd exemplifies how two similar lines of form can emerge and then transform to alter our perception of the space.

Dubforms will also include a sound piece, derived from field recordings and created to intensify the environment of Boyd’s design. To him, a field recording is the epitome of a landscape—what you see, hear, and feel before you. By taking a field recording of the gallery and gently manipulating it in several different ways, latent structures, echoes, and ghosts of forms begin to appear. Boyd compares this process to the transformative techniques of Dub, which take a song with lyrics, instruments, and a structure, and through the application of time delay, space echo, and multi-track mixing, reshape that song into a new whole that shows shades of the original, but really blossoms into a form all its own. If The Arcade is the track, Boyd considers the right side to be Dub A of the installation and the left side to be Dub B and he uses repetition, fragmentation, and a re-ordering process to change the space into a distinct and dynamic environment.

Bio

Justin Boyd earned his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 2003, and has since shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Texas, recently including Window Works, Artpace, San Antonio; Black Sounds, UTSA Satellite Space, San Antonio; I Drove the Mother Road Home to the Promised Land, Art Palace, Houston; Yew Tree Gate, cactus bra SPACE, San Antonio; and Lonely Are the Brave, Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, San Antonio. Boyd lives in San Antonio and lectures at The University of Texas San Antonio in the Department of Art and Art History.