Boyd & Evans: Overland

Flowers Gallery is pleased to present new photographic works by the artist duo Boyd & Evans. Overland brings together large-scale photographs that expand the artists’ ongoing visual exploration of the wilderness landscapes of the American South-West.

Since the 1970s, the remote and often hostile terrain of the Western United States, with its naturally surreal rock formations, luminous salt lakes and vast skies, has provided Boyd & Evans with a strange and other-worldly environment in which to contemplate the nature of seeing from their dual perspective.Over the course of their career, Boyd & Evans have used the camera as a notebook to record their experience of the world, the results of which were initially used as rich source material for collaborative paintings. Over the past two decades, photography has become central to their practice, as new digital technologies granted a more painterly approach to photographic collage.

Boyd & Evans’ characteristic panoramic format incorporates as many as 100 individual photographs, stitched together into wide, highly detailed vistas that appear to offer a heightened sense of reality. Often with subtle spatial distortions, or refined shifts of perspective, their images extend beyond the limits of ordinary vision, in what Tyler Cann has called a “playful exploration of perspective and space”.

The photographs in the current exhibition portray an environment devoid of human presence, yet they reveal traces of civilisation such as railway tracks, desert roads, and abandoned settlements. Produced during a recent journey from California to Colorado, Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico, Boyd & Evans returned to locations they have photographed and painted several times before to witness a constantly evolving, and at times cinematic narrative within the landscape.