Blindspot Gallery presents New Zealand-born, Hong Kong-based artist David Boyce’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong “From the Shoulder of Giants”, featuring his most recent photographic series From the Shoulder of Giants. The opening will also see the launch of the accompanying art book.

Boyce’s photographic point of view often looks at issues of identity, reality, perception and memory. From the Shoulder of Giants presents a series of self-portraits composed by a combination of images, paintings and projections that consider how an artist's development and practice is influenced by works of other artists’. The work questions whether true originality really exists. Boyce says, “none of us are an untainted, unexplored island and I have come to realise the ideal of the great, singular, heroic artist is something of a mythical construction".

Meaning that advancements rely on previous ideas and discoveries, and are not born anew, “from the shoulder of giants” is a concept with a history that extends back to Greek mythology. In the 12th Century French philosopher, Bernard of Chartres, said, “we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance”. Sir Isaac Newton also once wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”.

Boyce believes that art is the subject of influences and that all artists are collaborators by default – and that nothing is made that doesn’t build on what came before. In the series, portraits of artists from renaissance artists to abstract impressionists, minimalists to post modernists are layered, appearing as more than a single image, evoking a fantastical and haunting feeling of magic and trickery, smoke and mirrors. Boyce references artists he considers giants, bringing their work and influence into his works, in homage.

-Blindspot Gallery

Image: © David Boyce