Learn more about Martin Boyce’s solo exhibition on view now in LA! In ‘Long Distance’, five painted wall panels and a mobile act as the location for a series of analog telephones. Drawing inspiration from cinema and literature, Boyce explores the telephone and its relationship to drama and location. “I read this year that the last payphone in Manhattan was removed. These things that are so quintessentially part of the landscape, the urban fabric, are beginning to just disappear if they haven’t already. When you see in old movies people talking on payphones, it’s already starting to look a little quaint or unreadable...In a way, going into the public phone booth is becoming equally strange and almost a little uncanny. I think there’s something, in particular, if you look at it through the filter of, I guess, cinema or even literature, there’s something much more intimate and romantic about the landline because it’s those two fixed points in space that you’re not only phoning a person, but before the person gets there, you’re phoning a room. You’re phoning a building or a location. I guess that’s what was interesting to me was to think about those things, which of course, are really in a way, they’re quite obvious, but when you break them down, they really talk about ideas of communication, about location and distance, [and] the potential for the voids...As someone said, the phone allows us to be in two places at once. It allows us to travel through this conduit, this portal, and appear somewhere else.” Check out our website for the full conversation with Russell Ferguson! @mrtnbyce #MartinBoyce #TanyaBonakdar #TanyaBonakdarGallery