Interview with Rad Gal: Ela Boyd

It’s not often that I get to interview an old friend, whose artwork I love and spirit I admire. But Craft & Culture’s Ledger Magazine recently gave me the opportunity to do so with my junior high friend, fellow art lover, and former running buddy Ela Boyd.

You can buy hard copies here, and read the excerpt below…

Rad Gal: Ela Boyd
Ledger Magazine, Issue III

Simply put, Los Angeles-born and London-based artist Ela Boyd is a bad ass. Her light and video-installations combine technology, social media, projection, and performance to create an artistic happening for viewers to see, feel, and experience. She’s an artistic star on the rise and her “Expanded Cities” collaboration with photographer Aaron Farley recently opened in three cities across North America. I was lucky enough to sit down with her to catch up on her art in this digital age.

Ellen Caldwell: Can you tell me a little bit about your recent show “Expanded Cities”?

Ela Boyd: “Expanded Cities” is an exhibition that doesn’t exist in one place—it’s in three cities simultaneously. Each gallery has two screens and two web cameras and each has a color field. When you walk in, you interrupt the projection and become a silhouette on the screen. That gets recorded and gets projected in another city – and so on. So it becomes a loop and makes you wonder which silhouette is actually in your space and which is beaming in from somewhere else.

EC: That must be a wonderfully confusing and exciting experience as a viewer. What inspired this exhibit?

EB: I’ve been working on this idea of multiplicity and how we can be in several places simultaneously—both through media and consciousness. Through obvious ways like our Facebook profile and social media, but then also in the more abstract conceptual way of existing in the form of being, as an image of consciousness in someone else’s mind…

Ela Boyd is a new media installation artist originally from Hollywood, CA currently living and working in East London. She is a recent graduate of the UCSD Visual Art MFA program and received her BFA from California College of Arts in San Francisco.“Expanded Cities” will culminate in a closing reception in London. Visit the exhibition’s website to learn more.