Gallery Installations
Mark Bovey looks to the skies, and how we have historically imposed Zodiac readings across the heavenly bodies that revolve and rotate in our solar system. He cuts a section out of our translation of the night sky, and illuminates it by video projection through the interlocking representations of constellations: a mapping of animal, insect, bird and beastly figures of the signs we are born under. Woven into Bovey’s ancient rites of sky watching, he poses a wooden sailing vessel as a skeletal phantom containing fire and smoke: floating images of how we have translated our finding of this place through exploration. Bovey’s message lies beneath the cutout section from the universe he has clipped and pinned into place for us to recognize. His work begs us to re-evaluate the inventions by which we find ourselves through myth and astrology: forever looking at the night sky as some picture plane monitor upon which we project our location. But in fact, these references to birds and beasts and battleships, that collide in a lost section of a map torn from a book in a library, allow us to dream about what lies beyond those touchstones, those bits of debris we name that spin outside our imagination. Bovey’s landscape lies in the past: what we know and what we hope to know about. In this work, we imagine the rest of the map we do not see before our eyes. We are led to the edge of our beginnings: to when the explorers landed, sextant and compass and telescope in hand, to claim an uncharted land as their own. The black and white composition illustrates the science of knowledge that stirs in star charts, and follows mysticism and belief that brought old world to the new world six hundred years ago.
– Derek Michael Besant