Synchronisations

About

Since graduating from the Slade School of Art, London, last year, Boyd has continued to find form for fleeting or unlikely moments, mined from the real world, digital environments and the intersection of both. This sense of the ephemeral and multi-dimensional is amplified by his choice of materials and processes: textile works that extend from the wall into the room, craft into conceptual art.

Boyd is interested in how real-world phenomena are depicted in gaming environments and the experiential anomalies of traversing them. He cites a moment of déjà vu in Venice upon entering Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace) for the first time, only to later realise he had already intimately explored it within an early instalment of sci-fi video game Assassin’s Creed.

In his most recent works, he explores the current inability of sophisticated 3-D mapping technology to accurately capture the true seduction of real-world effects such as reflection, refraction and transparency. LiDAR, for example – a remote-sensing method used in atmospheric physics and now employed by game developers to enhance realism – is able to invent things it cannot definitively measure, he explains.

During his time in the gallery, Boyd is developing a body of works that visually manifest points of threshold – through woven, stitched and printed processes – between recollections of lived reality and virtual encounters. The title of the exhibition, Synchronisations, refers to a player’s adherence to re-treading the memories of an ancient ancestor within a computer simulation. In Assassin’s Creed, incomplete synchronisation is represented by areas of the surrounding architecture being engulfed by digitised flares of light.

Adam Boyd (born 1993, Newcastle-under-Lyme) lives and works in London. He graduated with an MFA from the Slade School of Art in 2022, having previously attained a BA Hons.in 2016, (Painting and Printmaking) from Glasgow School of Art. Recent exhibitions include New Contemporaries 2022, South London Gallery, London, 2023 and Strand Systems, Litla Gallerý, Hafnarfjordur, Iceland, 2021. His work will feature in Adam Boyd, Chaewon Lee, Rim Park, ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul, South Korea, 6 October-4 November 2023. Among other awards, he was a recipient of the Euan Uglow Scholarship (2019-2022). Boyd’s work is held in private collections both at home and abroad.  adamboydstudio.com