Nate Boyce. Knockdown Texture

Altman Siegel is pleased to present a show of new work by video artist/sculptor Nate Boyce. Boyce will present several new sculptures and single channel videos in his first solo show with the gallery.

Nate Boyce treats the temporal moving image as a basically malleable sculptural material, by using various image processing methods, ranging from obsolete to cutting edge, to engage with the act of making an object by hand. In his newest works, Boyce starts by shooting video of a rotating three-dimensional object and then builds compositions in the computer by partially reconstructing the object with 3D animation and analog video over the original footage. Ultimately mixing layers of mediation as sculptural texture, this process amplifies the contrasts between the grain of analog video and the super clean, digital look of CGI and calls attention to the surface of the screen itself.

The objects originally shot on video are carved by hand from foam, smoothly coated in plaster then airbrushed in elusive shades of metallic, iridescent and pearlescent colors that associatively counter the visceral and aggressive qualities of the form. Shown on industrial LCD screens mounted to monochromatically related steel frames, these objects in the round become flattened on the screen but assume a new dimensionality through the sculptural display.

Boyce will also exhibit single channel videos and irregularly shaped video stills printed on plastic and mounted on steel frames that extrude from the wall. These images are generated using an analog video setup that combines simple geometric shapes and refracted light to create painterly compositions emphasizing tense interactions between rectilinear and curvilinear forms.

Boyce looks back at the role of abstraction in early video art and explores the absence of dialogue it had with modernist painting and sculpture. He conflates sculpture and video to create compositions that live at the intersection of the two mediums, and relate more directly to the critical history of painting and sculpture than the narrative tradition of film and video. His work actively probes the ideas originally posited by 1960's Structuralist filmmakers, as he investigates formal ideas around Futurist and Cubist sculpture, late modernist painting, and more recent experiments in staged photography and new technology based practices.

Nate Boyce lives and works in San Francisco. He was featured in the California Biennial, 2010, and a recent solo show at IMO, Copenhagen. He participated in group shows at Vilma Gold, London, Jack Hanley, San Francisco, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Landings Project Space, Oslo, (Curated by Will Bradley), Deitch Projects, New York, (Curated by Takeshi Murata), Ullens Center For Contemporary Art, Beijing, Galerie Neue Alte Bruecke, Frankfurt, Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose. Nate Boyce is also actively involved in the experimental music scene, collaborating and touring with musical acts including Matmos and Oneohtrix Point Never with whom he has performed at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Royal Festival Hall, London, and The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, among others.

Nate Boyce
Knockdown Texture