Next Year You’ll Wish You Started Today (no. 100) Collage

My recent body of work employs both drawing and sewing techniques. In a systematic fashion, I draw or sew quarter-inch lines from left to right overlapping row by row to create a visual “white-noise” that takes the audience to an apophenic place (the experience of seeing patterns and connections in random or meaningless data/shapes). For me, the repetitive nature of the art-making process triggers a meditative state. Removing the referent to the external world, these sewn abstractions guide the viewer back to the repetition and elegance of the line, and invite the viewer to look inward for meaning. This inward gaze is meant to connect audiences to lost memories, forgotten dreams, and personal histories by allowing an access point to the unconsciousness. The mantra-like aesthetic of the densely sewn lines reveals the tension between the patterns we imagine and those that exist in mathematical truths — memories are unearthed as the past begins to interrupt reality. This body of work explores the language of abstraction and the difficulties, also failures, in translating ideas from man to machine. The delicate hand-drawn line works are digitized and run through a custom image compression program, pixilating the image beyond recognition. The image is then sent through an embroidery formatting software that attempts to translate the simple 2D digital file into a complex, thread-based object. The results are beautiful, impromptu abstractions that are systematically made by a logic-based machine. Boyd is trying to teach his sewing machine to think and react like an abstract expressionist painter.