Nate Boyce
A Light That Dies In My Mouth
Galerie Pepe is pleased to present A Light That Dies in My Mouth an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Nate Boyce (b. 1982, Kansas City, MO). November 16th, 2023 - January 20th, 2024
In the back of the gallery the animation, A Light That Dies in My Mouth, plays against a piece of scrim hanging from the ceiling. It’s a hand-drawn re-animation of a video of George Balanchine’s choreography for Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments—in which a duet of dancers move erratically, supposedly in synch with the twelve-tone composition—while rotoscoped cartoon figures emerge at varying speeds. On the neighboring video projection, processed images of Gottfried von Bismarck are overlaid with hand-drawn passages from the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. His poems are a starting point at the front of the gallery as well, where engravings dissolve into abstract notation on top of a series of aluminum sculptures that are contoured as though they've been set to music. They are sculptures of compositions that were poems written for a dance.
Anton Webern spent decades deconstructing music theory before encountering the problem: with such a detached form of music, where do you begin? He based a series of compositions off the poems of Trakl, who had spent the final years of his life serving as a nurse for the Austro-Hungarian Empire during WWI, an experience that confirmed the civilizational decline that he had fantasized about his entire life. Trakl translated this decline with decadence, which Webern then filtered through the discipline of his music. Musicologists frequently say that you can see mountains in his scores. In 1914, Trakl died of a medical cocaine overdose, while Webern was killed by a nervous American soldier two weeks after the end of WWII.
Trakl’s poetry is so emo that it’s almost funny. His scenes are filled with orphans and death; Decaying in a bush of thorns. He was obsessed with humanity’s seemingly incurable madness, and the idea that it was a daemon that ran through history and people. Madness itself was a shared form. He saw it in poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin, who had an intense influence on Trakl’s poetry, and had spent half of his life living isolated in a tower due to insanity. But Hölderlin thought that our lives were too ridiculous to be purely tragic. He thought the comedic form was the most applicable to our experience. In 1803, three years before Hölderlin was interned in a sanitarium and subsequently released into the care of a carpenter in Tübingen, he published Remarks on Oedipus in which he viewed certain myths through a decidedly comic, not tragic, light. He wrote, “Thus, man forgets himself and God turns, but in a sacred way, like a traitor.”
Patrick McGraw
In the back of the gallery the animation, A Light That Dies in My Mouth, plays against a piece of scrim hanging from the ceiling. It’s a hand-drawn re-animation of a video of George Balanchine’s choreography for Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments—in which a duet of dancers move erratically, supposedly in synch with the twelve-tone composition—while rotoscoped cartoon figures emerge at varying speeds. On the neighboring video projection, processed images of Gottfried von Bismarck are overlaid with hand-drawn passages from the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. His poems are a starting point at the front of the gallery as well, where engravings dissolve into abstract notation on top of a series of aluminum sculptures that are contoured as though they've been set to music. They are sculptures of compositions that were poems written for a dance.
Anton Webern spent decades deconstructing music theory before encountering the problem: with such a detached form of music, where do you begin? He based a series of compositions off the poems of Trakl, who had spent the final years of his life serving as a nurse for the Austro-Hungarian Empire during WWI, an experience that confirmed the civilizational decline that he had fantasized about his entire life. Trakl translated this decline with decadence, which Webern then filtered through the discipline of his music. Musicologists frequently say that you can see mountains in his scores. In 1914, Trakl died of a medical cocaine overdose, while Webern was killed by a nervous American soldier two weeks after the end of WWII.
Trakl’s poetry is so emo that it’s almost funny. His scenes are filled with orphans and death; Decaying in a bush of thorns. He was obsessed with humanity’s seemingly incurable madness, and the idea that it was a daemon that ran through history and people. Madness itself was a shared form. He saw it in poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin, who had an intense influence on Trakl’s poetry, and had spent half of his life living isolated in a tower due to insanity. But Hölderlin thought that our lives were too ridiculous to be purely tragic. He thought the comedic form was the most applicable to our experience. In 1803, three years before Hölderlin was interned in a sanitarium and subsequently released into the care of a carpenter in Tübingen, he published Remarks on Oedipus in which he viewed certain myths through a decidedly comic, not tragic, light. He wrote, “Thus, man forgets himself and God turns, but in a sacred way, like a traitor.”
Patrick McGraw
Nate Boyce, Untitled, 2023, Oil on aluminum, 52 x 21 × 13.5 cm, 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in
Nate Boyce, Untitled, 2023, Oil on wood panel, aluminum frame, 42 x 32 x 4 cm, 16 1/2 x 12 1/2 x 1 1/2 in
Nate Boyce, Untitled, 2023, Oil on aluminum, 25 x 17 x 17 cm, 9 3/4 x 6 3/4 x 6 3/4 in
Nate Boyce, Untitled , 2023, Oil on aluminum, 42 x 4.5 x 30 cm, 16 1/2 x 1 3/4 x 11 3/4 in
Nate Boyce, Untitled , 2023, Oil on aluminum, 44 x 16.5 x 16 cm, 17 1/4 x 6 1/2 x 6 1/4 in
Nate Boyce, Untitled, 2023, Oil on aluminum, 18.5 x 39 x 23 cm, 7 1/4 x 15 1/4 x 9 in
Nate Boyce, Untitled, 2023, Oil on aluminum, 20 x 48 x 16.5 cm, 7 3/4 x 19 x 6 1/2 in
Nate Boyce, Untitled, 2023, Oil on aluminum, 55 x 30 x 25 cm, 21 3/4 x 11 3/4 x 9 3/4 in
Nate Boyce, Untitled, 2023, Oil on aluminum, aluminum frame, 36.5 x 29 x 3 cm, 14 1/4 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/4 in
Nate Boyce, Untitled, 2023, HD Video, 2 min, Ed 5 / 2 AP
Nate Boyce, A Light That Dies in My Mouth, 2023, HD Video, 4 mins 30 sec, Ed 5 / 2 AP
Nate Boyce (b.1982) lives and works in New York City. Selected solo exhibitions include the Kunstverein München, Munich; the Yerba Buena Center for Contemporary Art, SF, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; and IMO Projects, Copenhagen. Select group exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; Vilma Gold, London; the Abrons Art Center, NY; On Stellar Rays, NY; the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Regularly touring with his collaborator, Oneohtrix Point Never, Boyce has presented shows for the Museum of Modern Art, NY; MoMA PS1, NY; the SFMoMA, SF; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Barbican, London; Royal Festival Hall, London and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh.
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