28 November 2019 – 25 January 2020
about the exhibition
Artists Alexander Boynes and Mandy Martin have collaborated over the last six years on four large public exhibitions addressing the issue of climate change. Their current project is ‘Hi-Vis Futures’, at the Canberra Museum and Gallery until 4 February 2020. ‘Slow Hope’ at Beaver Galleries is a parallel and complementary exhibition, prompted in part by a seminal essay of the same name by Christof Mauch. In a call to ‘rethink ecologies of crisis and fear’, Mauch beseeches us to believe in our power, individually and in populations, to make millions of small gestures to mitigate our carbon footprint and avert full-blown catastrophe. Alexander Boynes is a Canberra-based artist whose practice encompasses painting, photography, print media, light-based work and video installation. Works in ‘Slow Hope’ extend his recent exploration of the social and environmental ramifications of fossil fuel extraction. He has hand-drawn and solvent-washed elegant tonal images on his signature aluminium supports, his totemic eucalypts standing ‘en garde’ against cooling towers and smoke stacks shrouded in vapour.
Alexander Boynes graduated with honours in gold and silversmithing from the School of Art at the Australian National University in 2004. The following year his work featured in ‘Talente’ at the Munich Art Fair. He held his first solo exhibition in 2009 in Canberra and has since exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions around Australia. Also an experienced arts administrator and curator, he has brought many exhibitions to fruition for the Canberra Contemporary Art Space. His collaborative projects include ‘Arnhembrand’, an art, science and stories project promoting healthy country and communities in the Djelk Indigenous Protected Area of Arnhem Land, undertaken with Mandy Martin. In 2013, Alexander established PRAXIS, a multidisciplinary collective exploring links between visual art, performance and sound, with choreographer/dancer Laura Boynes and cellist/composer Tristen Parr. PRAXIS presented a full-length performance work, ‘Dark Matter’, at the State Theatre Centre of Western Australia in 2016. ‘Luminous Relic’, a major painting, sound and moving image work that Alexander created with Mandy Martin and Tristen Parr, was exhibited at Geelong Gallery and Orange Regional Gallery in 2017 and Canberra Museum and Gallery in 2019. Alexander’s work is represented in many collections including those of Artbank, the University of Canberra, the ACT Legislative Assembly, the Macquarie Group and the Centre for Art + Environment in Nevada, USA.
