About the Exhibition

Exhibition essay by Skylar Borgstrom 

Halifax-based artist Mark Bovey uses printmaking techniques from past and present to explore his personal fascination with the ways humans connect, learn and question place. Bovey presents the collapse of space and time, known and unknown, through the multiple layers and varied processes used to create his work. 

Bovey is an artist and Associate Professor at the Nova  Scotia College of Art and Design University who has exhibited both nationally and internationally. His work includes traditional printmaking techniques (intaglio, lithography, screen printing and woodcut) and more recent modes of artistic production including inkjet prints and digital video projection. With one foot in printmaking’s oldest and most fundamental technologies, and the other residing firmly in the present, Bovey’s work creates a bridge between that which we think we know and that which we seek to understand. 

Previously, Bovey has used a combination of traditional and new media techniques to create installation works like those in Ledge_Suite (2011). Exhibited in “Last Frontier”, which was curated by Sarah Filmore at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Ledge_Suite challenges our concepts as virtual as opposed to lived experience through a backlit video projection of century-old documents, including a ledger from 1895 in works like Plume. For the past five years Mark Bovey has explored the nature of printmaking as a surrogate for the virtual experience and his current body of work is a continuation of his interest in the function of printed media in communication and technologies’ ever expanding nature. 

First impressions of Bovey’s newest 20” x 30” faux slate works in World Machine reveal the use of “trompe-l’œil”, an optical illusion or trick of the eye, designed to give the viewer a sense that they are examining an age-old teaching tool and traditional repository or knowledge, the chalkboard. 

As Bovey’s work, created through multiple technologies and media, writes, re-writes and scrapes away the surface, literally and figuratively, so too does the traditional chalkboard. If a chalkboard is  a locale of learning and information transfer, Bovey reveals it also as one of erasure, repositioning and revised histories. 

Bovey’s critical understanding of printmaking’s varied process allows him to treat “every work as a journey” in which the exploration of a multitude of artistic media creates a forum for open dialogue between artist and viewer. Bovey’s hope is that the works elicits questions about the “evolution of knowledge through technology,” as viewers are encouraged to evaluate their own relationship to art, science, knowledge and technological innovation. By contrasting the concept of “real” and the projection of “real” Bovey affords viewers the opportunity to question history and truth for themselves. 

If we agree that what we have been taught as factual history is in a reality a manufactured construct frequently gilded as truth, and that technology is thought to have a homogenizing effect on culture, Bovey’s World Machine exhibition attempts to usurp the effects of both “fact” and technology by combining them. 

About the Artist

Mark Bovey is an artist and Associate Professor in the Printmak­ing Area at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Hali­fax Nova Scotia Canada (2004-present). He received his MVA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta in 1992 and his BFA from Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario in 1989. Bovey’s work has represented Canada internationally in juried biennial and triennial exhibitions in 17 nations worldwide. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada including 15 curatorial projects. Bovey’s practice ranges from traditional printmaking (combinations of Intaglio, Lithography, screen printing and woodcut) to print installation works incorporating inkjet and digital video projection that reference and incorporate the history of printed forms. His work is in numerous collections, most recently, the Cana­dian Foreign Affairs Visual Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax Canada, Tama Arts University Tokyo, and the Danforth Museum, Boston Massachusetts USA.