Margaret Reid Boyer

Seams 

October 14 - December 1, 2017

Margaret Reid Boyer describes her work as Narrative Realism.  These photographs are not completely narrative and yet there is a feeling of story, a feeling of living. The photographs in Seams contain evidence of a lived in home, however they are not photographs of people. They are, in most cases, images of inanimate objects, although the pictures cannot be categorized as still lifes.  The objects in the photographs are evidence of the life within the home. Contradictions exist within these images: beauty in chaos, simplicity in clutter. At first glance the images are unpretty and yet as the viewer spends time with them, they become more familiar and compelling. Reid Boyer is unflinching in her exploration of her own world, and this personal exploration leads to a connection with the modern world outside of this home.

“I am starting with the assumption that something is wrong.  With the culture, the country, the neighbors, or maybe just with me. The familiar facade is unreliable.  I am concentrating on detail and specificity in order to draw the viewer’s response into a complex set of associations that probes beneath the burnished surface to discover fragments of an elusive narrative.  This narrative speaks about the dissatisfactions that run as a current through the American dream: the unattended desires and crossed wires, the isolation at the heart of the illusion of belonging. I am trying to identify this predicament and convey some kind of understanding, which cannot be obtained through the consultation of pharmaceuticals, manuals, maps or technology. I am examining my own postage stamp of reality in order to relay something about the state of a contemporary American Female.” - Margaret Reid Boyer

Margaret Reid Boyer was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York where she currently resides with her husband and four children.  She received a BA degree in Art History from Vassar College and an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts.