Photographer Derek Paul Boyle tells it like it is. With work like “pushing a picture of an open road up an open road” and “rock in a baggie surrounded by other rocks not in baggies”, oh and a personal fav of mine, “a metal print of a crushed tin bucket in a tin bucket leaning up against a crushed tin bucket in a tin bucket”, Boyle leaves little to our imagination. Or does he?

The Boston-based graduate of RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) is interested in the power of contradiction. He shoots a mounted underexposed polaroid next to an overexposed one, he tries to find “meaning” in Google maps, and he answers the question that has plagued and intrigued us for yonks: the glass isn’t half full or half empty, it’s just a “glass half full of glass”! Oh, and yeah, he sculpted a butter knife out of butter... fitting, right?

What’s most intriguing about Boyle’s work is that it’s somewhat comical, but not childish. He discusses the almost elementary idea of opposition, but approaches it in a way that’s playful and pressing. In a wavering step between angst and serenity, fear and pleasure, Boyle gives form to anxiety, a shape to tension...

Boyle reminds us that everything doesn’t have (to have) a fixed to a definition.

http://www.derekpaulboyle.com