Mind Installations: Ela Boyd on Art and the Future
In her view, "The screen is consciousness externalized," so it is only fitting that our conversation occurs through a computer screen. The dichotomy of her humanness through such a platform parallels the contrast between her meditative responses with the shiny jagged aesthetic of her art. In a world where iPhone models become outdated in a span of two-years, she is lightyears ahead, suggesting that our entire modes of perceiving are outdated:
"I think we do have a really sophisticated sense of the visual and a sophisticated visual system in that we're constantly taking in information and rendering it in 3D. You know what the backside of your laptop screen looks like right now even though you can't see it because you've seen one before or you can interpolate based on the shape of the front of the laptop. I'm always interested in 2D vs. 3D—how the screen flattens images and how to expand the screen. I think that's so outdated to think "Oh, that's just an image or it's just representational." I feel it has more of a power or presence. If it appears to be three-dimensional one often assumes it is more viable as 'actual' object."
This line of questioning makes for particularly effective art for the current generations that are still wrapping their heads around the changes digital media has brought about. Citing Cubism and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as some of her many inspirations, Boyd suggests that "With internet and digital, we can have that multifaceted seeing. There are webcams all over the world we can tune into, we can see all over the world, we can see into outer-space, we can see ourselves reflected back, past moments, and it's this network of seeing that composes our contemporary ontological experience."
She muses about the collective suspension of disbelief that takes place when watching campy 1960's science fiction shows, where tinfoil becomes an accepted indicator of outer-space and expands that to the collective acceptance of a cinematic icon as an actual 'dis-embodied' presence within the collective consciousness and then and takes that to "the deepest level of how we collectively agree on how time functions."
In spite of being young, Boyd has already exhibited alongside the art world's big stars, such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin, John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. Last summer, Boyd performed in James Turrell's Perceptual Cell installation during his retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she chatted excitedly with Brad Pitt about perception, time and space. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Ozu, an artist's residency in Rome, located in an old candy factory owned by an artist couple. As she speaks, the audio echoes with a slight delay, eerily mimicking her theories of temporal multiplicities. Her philosophies are cosmically subversive, and the more she outlines them, the fuzzier reality becomes. Her laughter punctuates the enigmas; Boyd is a master at diving into esoteric speculation just deep enough to remain seen, and tying metaphorical ropes to familiar objects to guide her way.
"Say you Google a table. There's the image of the table but there's also somebody who thought of the table and had this image of consciousness of the table and somebody made the table and thought to photograph it and put it on Google and multiple people can search the table and can be looking at the image of the table at the same time and then that image is in their consciousness. We can have a multiplicity of table-ness, and all those instances create the one object of the table."
I ask her how she reconciles believing time exists in a nonlinear way while being a body in linear time. She realizes her theories clash with day to day realities: "You can't think that way all the time because you have to schedule meetings! I don't think we could operate on a practical level with that really abstract sense of time but maybe, without the risk of sounding New Age, be present in the moment. Ideally, we can see the way in which moments are interchangeable past and present. We can see that our future determines our past."
Though her work deals in the phenomenological, she is careful to steer clear of anything that might seem too spiritual, suggesting the art world and academia are unwelcoming of such things. "Whether it's Deepak Chopra or Kant, they touch upon these same issues of what is real, how do I know what I'm seeing is real, what is my spirit, what is my body, how can I locate myself in time and space? It seems like it has more traction in the art world to talk about it [from a philosophical perspective]. In my personal life I think about a lot of that stuff too like I'll meditate and think about the cosmos and the nature of time and space but I guess sometimes if you just speak about it in those terms it's disregarded because it's not grounded in anything. It's like "Oh I had a vision of this!" Whereas if you're quoting a philosopher from 200 years ago who people have studied, it's okay."
She is also conscious of the numbing effect of overpowering aesthetics, and worries audiences will "Be seduced by something as really beautiful but not see the deeper ontological implications of time and space and locating oneself within that system. For my thesis, I stripped out all the color…just to strip away anything that could be distracting, and ideally hoping the viewer would focus on either locating oneself or rather dis-locating oneself—a sense of the multiplicity of being."
Boyd recently moved to London and has plans to exhibit there in the near future. She rented an artist's studio in East London where she has been working on building film sets that also function as installations and vice-versa. She has been doing some really interesting films with dancers and projection and will continue creating works dealing with projection of the 'image-self' and projected worlds. She also does freelance art direction, and was recently hired by a fashion creative agency to do digital campaign work for Target's recent collaboration with high-end British designer Peter Pilotto, based off of her affinity for geometric designs in her own work. "I like the cross between art, fashion and design. I think that's another product of digital: they can all just come together. I think it's sort of outdated to say only the white cube is for art, and only fashion or advertising is commercial but now you see so many artists doing different projects with different fashion brands.” She has started to a new project called LIGHT STUDIOS Ltd. which combines art, music and fashion projects. With LIGHT, she plans to host events that offer a new way to experience art/sound/performance and ephemeral works. Boyd is now doing experiential design in London for work- predominantly new media installations for large scale retail concepts and flagship stores.
"I used to do design in advertising as my day-job before I went back to school, and it was always very separate in my mind like 'This is my day-job where I work so I can make money to support my art which is really conceptual and abstract.' But now they're really coming together where I can do something really abstract and avant-garde for a fashion film or a music video and it could be really interesting and fun and if a company has a budget to do it and they want something really artistic and interesting that's great. I'm in a good place where I'm getting hired for my conceptual and aesthetic expertise."
She offhandedly spouts brilliant sociological observations in the way most people digress about nothing in particular. Branching off of the blurring line between the two spheres of work she does, Boyd throws in part of her theory of images: "Whether it lives as a meme, or a video that people like to watch that spreads through Facebook feeds or whatever, or it's in a gallery or a museum and people watch it in that context, it's iterations of an image proliferating."
It's unclear who is the real Ela Boyd and who is just an iteration of Ela Boyd in her work, but one thing is clear: she has put art out into the world that is threatening to alter the things we hold fundamentally true, and her work will make waves in space and time forever after.
