Daniel Boyd

2015

218 pages
21 x 27 x 2.5 cm
Softcover with screenprinted clear vinyl jacket
Published by Perimeter Editions & STATION
ISBN: 978-0-9873530-5-4

The majority of discussions surrounding Daniel Boyd’s particular iteration of postcolonialist history painting, video and installation work have centred on the idea of the deletion of information and history, especially in relation Boyd’s Aboriginal and Vanuatuan heritage. But there is far more to his distinctive pointillist technique, in which he blackens much of painted surface to leave only a sea of “lenses” that reveal the information beneath, than a simple rumination on erasure.

It is no sleight of hand that The Law of Closure, the first book tracing Boyd’s oeuvre, is titled after a Gestalt law. Boyd’s devices are not just about absence, but a kind of psychohistorical ellipsis. The dark matter that enshrouds the flashes of perceptual detail in his works is as much an element of the image as are the landscapes, portraits, reflections and refractions of light that lie amidst and beneath it.