Patricia L Boyd

Artist-in-residence Patricia L Boyd invited audiences behind-the-scenes to experience the mechanical configuration of her video in mid-production. This work-in-progress event was presented as a “live filming” with performer Nour Mobarak, a Los Angeles-based poet and voice-over artist.

For the shoot, a networked group of cameras were rigged in EMPAC’s Theater to run continuously, recording horizontal and vertical tracking shots in constant motion. This apparatus, which Boyd described as an “overactive metabolism,” is programmed to run automatically, and a human subject, often seen in bed, is captured (in both senses) and made visible through the infrastructure of these multiple perspectives. The footage produced became a new moving-image work, called Negative Reps, which premiered in early fall 2016. The project came out of Boyd’s research into exhaustion and its management as internal to and constitutive of biopower. 

Relocated from the UK to the Bay Area, Patricia L Boyd has presented solo exhibitions at Jan Kaps, Cologne; Kiria Koula, San Francisco; TG, Nottingham; YEARS, Copenhagen (with Rachal Bradley); Modern Art Oxford; and OHI0, Glasgow. Boyd has exhibited internationally in group shows including Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Gasworks, London; and the 12th Lyon Biennale.