Kevin Boyle, “Glacial Flour, Galactic Birth,” 2018
photograph, 56” x 42”
Kevin Boyle’s latest photographs feature slabs of ice and impossibly blue lakes. But look closely at the images of glaciers that he shot for Elemental / Ice, on view from Jan. 12 to Feb. 2 at the Kimoto Gallery in Vancouver, and you’ll see plenty of silt and other sediments.
Yet the grittiness of these shots are nothing compared to the surveillance shots Boyle takes as a plainclothes officer for the Vancouver Police Department as he documents drug deals and other crimes.
Boyle honed his camera skills doing police work – particularly the importance of capturing the critical moment and avoiding silly mistakes like forgetting to remove the shutter cap.
“You have to learn pretty quick under pressure,” he says. “You have to be ready to shoot at any time when you do surveillance work. It gets you prepared for whatever happens. I think the biggest thing is adaptability.”
Kevin Boyle, “Tributary Glaciers, Mount Jester,” 2018
photograph, 42” x 42”
In 2011, he got interested in photography as an art form, and began shooting arresting night-time scenes of small-town prairie life. Then he turned his eye to herds of cattle. Last year, he decided to take aerial shots of the glaciers around Whistler, B.C., with a friend who is a pilot.
“I’d never seen anything like it before,” says Boyle. “ We were 8,000 to 10,000 feet up above, looking down on these massive sheets, and understanding that they’re not going to be here at the rate we’re going.”
Kevin Boyle, “Glacial Flour, Add Water and Mix,” 2018
photograph, 56” x 42”
Boyle's images – some were taken around Mount Waddington in the Powell River area on the Sunshine Coast north of Vancouver – are spectacular.
His dramatic compositions at times evoke the brushwork of abstract expressionism and the textures are particularly remarkable, the ice wrinkled and ridged, scraped pitilessly by time.
Seeing how much ice had disappeared, even between visits several weeks apart, drove home to Boyle how vital it is to mitigate climate change.
He believes artists can help change people’s perspective about critical issues.
“I think our role is to educate and to be able to spark conversation,” he says. ■
Elemental / Ice is on view at the Kimoto Gallery in Vancouver from Jan. 12 to Feb. 2, 2019.
