leslie dylan boyd
they/them
Denver, CO, USA
leslie boyd is an artist and educator whose practice sites itself on the body. Their research interests include cultural appropriation, social practice, gender, and US political identities/affiliations. leslie’s most recent work explores the passage of queer bodies through ""wilderness"" spaces and is expressed through object making, performance, and video.
leslie studied Metalsmithing + Jewelry at the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA) and Pratt Institute (BFA). They have exhibited throughout the US and in venues abroad such as Ghost Gallery in New York, the super+Centercourt Gallery in Munich, Germany, and at Object Rotterdam in Holland. leslie lives in Denver, CO where they are an Associate Professor of Art and the Jewelry Area Coordinator at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
“When I first began to venture into the wilderness (a colonial construct) I was most afraid of what it would be like to encounter remote spaces, unknown creatures, and inclement weather. Instead, I was most struck by a compulsion to make sense of my queer, femme body. I was made aware of my body’s vulnerability not by the landscape, but by the others passing through it.
Why are you here? Are you allowed to be?
This pattern, taken from a security envelope, is meant to shield our identity. It mimics the way glaciers, ever receding, are indicated on topographic maps.”
"Untitled (Venus on Mars), Video on iPad, 2024How does your work relate to the theme connection?
“I have felt both the most and least safe in my body in wild, expansive outdoor spaces.
The least safe when I encounter other people, or when I read the settler given placenames for grand peaks that celebrate colonizers and bury the indigenous histories.
The safest when I am alone or with my chosen people. When I am testing what my body is physically capable of and all the decades of discomfort I have felt with it are lost."
NYCJW24 @ UrbanGlass, Francely Flores
“I assemble knowledge, trinkets, materials, quotes, photocopied pages, ideas scrawled onto napkins, and voice notes on my phone. They sit on my desk and are taped to the wall in front of it. Connections appear. Some are subtle, and others obvious. Sometimes it is not until the work is complete, sitting on that same desk, surrounded by a cloud of my conscious, that it falls into place. “Yes, this is what it has been about all along.”
For this work, like all before, that was my creative process: printed topo maps from trips past and future; books like Perpetual Mirage, Contested Landscape, The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West; a pile of envelopes meticulously split open to explore their patterned interiors; pictures from mars, taken by the rover; some of my favorite quotes from Cruising Utopia.
These disparate things are connected. They’re about belonging and non-belonging. About conquest and being conquered."
What role does connection play in your creative process?
NYCJW24 @ UrbanGlass, Simon Leung
"As an educator working in a medium so intrinsically tied to the body and identity, my queerness is unapologetic. The studio at my school has become a space for queer community, acceptance, exploration, and joy. The space I always needed."
What connection(s) does your queerness make to the world around you?
NYCJW24 @ UrbanGlass, Francely Flores
[queerphoria]v4 @ ECU Symposium
