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Tate Report 2004-2006

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Martin Boyce
born 1967
From ‘Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours’
2002
Fluorescent tubes, electrical components and powder-coated steel
Purchased from The Modern Institute, Glasgow (General Funds) 2006
T12132

From ‘Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours’

© Martin Boyce

Martin Boyce’s vision of a nocturnal urban park explores the changing cultural meanings of objects that were originally designed with optimistic and egalitarian values in mind. At night these communal areas often function in ways that resist the town planner’s original intentions, as they are frequently a meeting place for teenagers who are experimenting with the much anticipated nighttime freedoms of adulthood. Boyce's schematic forms create a dreamlike environment that has a psychological and emotional dimension, as well as a physical one. It is a landscape that hovers between the real and the imaginary, that is at once romantic and melancholic.

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