SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- San Francisco-based artist Nate Boyce maintains a hybrid process using 3D modeling, video and sculpture to produce video sculptures and sculptural videos that morph and manipulate space. Producing an uncanny, disorienting experience for the viewer, the artist’s complex, visceral forms gesture towards new forms of embodiment across animation and sculpture. His practice considers how computerized simulation enables the mutation of objects and the infinite mutability of space, provoking a reflection on the present and future of digitally rendered forms. Curator Ceci Moss states that within the exhibition, “Animation, sculpture, and environment become pliable material for an experience that sets the viewer adrift.”

In previous works, the artist would make sculptures by hand, shoot them rotating in a green screen light box and modify the footage in 3D modeling software, which would then be used as a basis for standalone sculptures or sculptures with looped animation. The sculptures themselves involve industrial methods that mimic the slick veneer of computer-generated images (CGI), such as airbrushing, powder coating, and 3D printing. At the same time, the artist’s color choice lends an affective dimension to the works, where the polychromatic color schemes found in painting are chosen over the synthetic bold pop colors often associated with commercial CGI, operating as a wrap or a foil over the form. Through this process, Boyce has developed a unique formal vocabulary in which the sculptures and videos evolve and mutate, informing one another over time.

Commissioned by YBCA, Polyscroll presents a new body of work that emphasizes hand-drawn and painterly representation. Boyce’s new works layer his handmade drawings into his animations and sculpture, while foregrounding lighting settings within 3D modeling software. Boyce’s sketches flicker and recede over fluid, shifting shapes as they horizontally drift across large flat screens. Abstract plinths balance welded metal that move like a curving line, while steel grids twist and jut out from the railing. Toying with light and structure, Polyscroll references the illusion of pictorial space throughout the history of painting and sculpture, and the central role of light in the production of depth. Describing the process behind a number of his new animated paintings featuredin the exhibition, Boyce explains that, “Each painting begins with a drawing or a linear motif that becomes an initial scaffold for the fleshy viscous application of color that gets carved back into the white ground.” As a study of how our tools create the semblance of space and depth in 2D and 3D space, the works highlight the phenomenological quality of objects as they alter their surroundings and with it, our perception.

Nate Boyce was born in 1982 in Kansas City, Missouri, and currently lives and works in San Francisco. He earned a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2006. He has had solo exhibitions at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha (2012); San Francisco Film Society in San Francisco (2012); Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco (2012); IMO Projects in Copenhagen (2012); Noma Gallery in San Francisco (2010); and Partisan Gallery in San Francisco (2009). He has been included in group exhibitions internationally and nationally such as Equations of Sight-Similarity at On Stellar Rays in New York City (2014); Rematerialized at New Galerie U.S. in New York (2013); The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things at Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, UK (2013); The Extension at Vilma Gold, London (2011); California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2010); and Stray Alchemists Sessions at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2008). Boyce is also actively involved in the experimental music scene, collaborating and touring with musical acts including Matmos and Oneohtrix Point Never with whom he has performed at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Barbican, London; Royal Festival Hall, London; and The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, among others. He has been an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Exploratorium.