Daniel Boyd - The Law of Closure | Author: Bergit Arends

The majority of discussions surrounding young Sydney-based artist Daniel Boyd's particular iteration of post-colonialist history painting, video and installation work have centered on the idea of the deletion of information and history, especially in relation Boyd's Aboriginal and Vanuatuan heritage. But there is far more to his distinctive pointillist technique, in which he blackens much of painted surface to leave only a sea of "lenses" that reveal the information beneath, than a simple rumination on erasure.

It is no sleight of hand that The Law of Closure, the first book tracing Boyd's oeuvre, is titled after a Gestalt law. Boyd's devices are not just about absence, but a kind of psycho-historical ellipsis. The dark matter that enshrouds the flashes of perceptual detail in his works is as much an element of the image as are the landscapes, portraits, reflections and refractions of light that lie amidst and beneath it.

Softcover
21 x 27 cm
218 pages