Martin Boyce Faraway Skies, 2023
Faraway Skies consists of a painted steel panel to which a cast resin wall telephone model with coiled cable has been attached. Two line ornaments and a circular element appear reminiscent of electrical installations. The work appears as a cut-out fragment of a room wall, suggesting a continuation of the possibly larger wall beyond the panel’s surface. The elements invoke the wall-mounted cable telephones that were ubiquitous devices of the 20th century but have largely become obsolete.
On closer view, the phone’s design features – the rhomboid buttons and the shape of its case – echo the geometry of the wall molding. The forms refer to the 1925 Concrete Trees by the brothers Jan and Joël Martel which since 2005 have functioned as "a lexicon of shapes and forms" for the artist. The circular metal cut-out is also a recurring motif in Boyce's formal vocabulary.