Reviews

Boyd & Evans: Landmarks

Milton Keynes Galley 29 January-3 April 2005

Its the big skies that do it. Vast, open, and cloudless save for strands of white speeding across them at an unknowable speed. Below, at the edge of the desert, the ephemera of dusty one-horse towns. This is America. At least, this is Boyd and Evans' America.

Its the place where the new is endlessly discarded. A caravan lies in a lagoon, a child's playground abandoned (beneath a snow as merciless as the blowing sands of the dustbowl).

But, in this exhibition of new work in Boyd and Evans' home city, these luscious, beautiful photographs skip beyond the classicism of their imagery. In the main body of work, the Colour and Black and White series, Boyd & Evans use a simple but painterly, technique, of stripping the colour from all but a key motif: a too-blue swimming pool reflecting a monochrome sky, the blinding Technicolor white of a chapel, in stark contrast to the subtler shades of grey in the lawns and trees that surround it.

Tonopah Playground 2004, photographic inkjet print 108x129cm

Beside a road in La Brea stands a pile of furniture, the contents of a defunct diner, some old tyres, giant fibreglass hands, for sale. – classic Americana, future antiques, all for sale. In this big country, you just can't take these and conserve them as symbols of a vanished past – they must be remade as newness, even if an unlikely newness. The keys to this language of hallucinatory signs are in the newest work in the show Anecdote, a 12 meter long run of glossy full colour pictures remake the imagery from the Colour and Black and White pictures – the Airstream trailer is if not shiny and new, shiny and in use, some hick guy sitting outside and the mysterious swimming pool, miles from anywhere is now empty and abandoned... a kind of reversal, the colour flowing back in.

Bracketing this, the oldest work in the show, Roundup is a collaged record of Boyd & Evans first 1977 US trip, the beginning of their love affair with the extraordinary everyday of the American dream. Here, time has frayed the edges - the jigsaw method they used to assemble these photomontages is coming apart, and their colours fading to sepia – old, unrestored Hollywood celluloid to the new works CGI. Again, the image stripped down, presented as symbols: motel, car, people.

Between these two works, the whole show is a documentary, a travelogue, and a curious one. Reality is made symbolic, linearity broken down, and movement is frozen across this vast open space (in the abounding imagery of parked, broken abandoned cars and empty railroads). Instead, the work speaks of an isolation, a stasis, a journey not over space but through an idea of a big empty country. Aptly, though perhaps more awkwardly, the work positioned in the centre of the exhibition reflects this: in Crossing two huge curving images face one another, alluding to a real space, a crossing of rail and road, reality and its photographic imprint.

Warm Springs 2003, photographic inkjet print 110x240.5cm

On this vast plain, these ghostly images take on what the surrealists might have termed the unheimlich - the experience of the uncanny, the unfamiliar, that yet also contains the experience of the home-like. These are places we recognise, not from our visits but from never having been there. They are landmarks of imagination.

Tim Machin

• John Goto
• Green in Black and White
• Photo London 2007
• Paris Photo 2006
• London Polygon and the book Room
• Jude Wall - Re-form
• Welcome to Britain
• Derek Henderson - The Terrible Boredom of Paradise
• Empty Days by Paddy Summerfield
• Arles 2005
• Boyd & Evans 2005
• Frieze 2004
• Javier Silva Meinal
• Arles 2004
• Frieze 2003
• Happy Vicitims by Kyoichi Tsuzuki

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