Nate Boyce. Polyscroll II, 2015 (video still); HD video. Courtesy of the Artist and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.

At a recent screening accompanying Nate Boyce’s Polyscroll exhibition at YBCA, the artist presented a group of abstract films and video/media art that have been influential to his work, particularly as examples of how film can approach being painterly.

While the films Boyce showed—Robert Breer’s menacing but playful frame-by-frame animations, Paul Sharits’ violent, physically distressing flashes in Ray Gun Virus—address many of the themes central to Polyscroll, it’s Boyce’s own supercut of a Willem de Kooning documentary with clips and sounds from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) that is the most critical for uncovering some of the exhibition’s deeper impulses. Boyce’s mash-up combines shots of the hyper-canonical abstract expressionist creating larger-than-life painterly gestures against what Boyce calls the “visceral, biomorphic” aggressive presence of the alien’s uncanny movements and breathing. The resulting effect is grotesque but formally fascinating: How is the creation of a creature like the alien as a sculptural, kinetic, and cinematic object akin to a brushstroke? The question is a timely one, especially now that we are in the age of digital rendering and modeling; Boyce cited the zbrush tool as an analogue to oil painting. How have the some of the most basic art-historical relationships like painting and sculpture changed, and what are the new potentialities for crossbreeding?

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