MARS Gallery, Melbourne, 22 October – 26 November, 2016.
At first glance, Adam Boyd’s ‘Lend me your ear, I’ll give you my tongue’ offers viewers a wall of intricate, convoluted lines, punctuated by cracks, slits and, on occasion, windows through which oceans of blank space can be seen. The effect is arresting, almost overwhelming! But at a second glance, things begin to change. What at first seemed a wall becomes a complex pattern of interacting/overlapping forms, clashing perspectives, and zones of intensity, alongside a dizzy variety of visual and verbal puns, allusions, and jokes. Figures appear within figures; pictures are found within pictures; image evokes myth; text hovers on the boundary between word and image; disparate parts cohere to form unexpected wholes; and so on. ‘A wall with cracks soon collapse’, the title of one of Boyd’s large-scale drawings…” *
* text sourcecamera: lx100
