DRAWING CONNECTIONS
With cartographic traces, Marc Boyson captures ‘the everyday as art’
Where some drivers might see gridlock during their daily commute, a local artist and art professor sees beauty in his travels from one location to another.
“If you have to sit in the car for half an hour trying to get home, and it’s just stop-and-go traffic along the freeway, it can be a moment where it’s grating, but it also can be a moment where you transition from work life to home life, and it can also have this kind of beautiful connotation,” says Marc Boyson.
Boyson captured his appreciation for the beauty he sees in everyday travel in an art show on view at the Association for Visual Arts that he calls “Our Land Is Your Land Is My Land.” Instead of depicting humans, Boyson depicts human activity, he explains.
Leaders within the local art community selected Boyson’s work as Best in Show in the “AVA Juried Members Exhibition” in 2016. His solo exhibition in the AVA Gallery this year is his reward. The five-week display continues through Jan. 5.
The artwork ranges from $100 to $500. He is selling framed ink drawings of routes used to commute to different areas, and has already sold at least two pieces, a career first, he says. He drew one piece using clay directly onto AVA’s wall. Other art pieces include framed ink drawings and diamond-shaped objects made from cardboard and a few ceramics.
Boyson, 43, is a professor at the School of Visual Art and Design at Southern Adventist University. He began exploring “the space between places” after earning a graduate degree from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2013.
He’s always been interested in maps, even as a child, he says.
His family regularly got National Geographic magazine, and he recalls playing with the maps inside them.
Boyson says his father loved exploring, and they often spent weekends driving for an hour or two before ending up at a national park to go hiking.
While the routes he depicts in his artwork would never be mistaken for a cartographic map, Boyson sees similarities, only his are more personal. He describes his artwork as an invisible line of autobiographical data revealing his daily journey between buildings, to work or run errands.
It’s “the everyday as art,” says Boyson. “The question I seek to answer through memory, intuition and digital recording is: How can I manifest the ordinary act of the cartographic trace into the beautiful.”
Contact Yolanda Putman at 423-757-6431 or yputman@timesfree press.com.