Boyle is one of 90 new participants showing at this year’s Eastside Cultural Crawl. The Crawl’s 28th edition features over 500 established and emerging painters, sculptors, glass-blowers, ceramicists, photographers and more in their studios, workshops, and galleries.
Kevin Boyle drops himself “in the middle of nowhere on Google Maps" then starts just clicking until he finds buildings that match what he's looking for.
By day, Kevin Boyle is a policeman who has headed the VPD’s missing persons unit and will soon be helping the Surrey police department set up theirs. By night, and by day sometimes too, he’s a photographer who trains his camera on mountain ranges and lone, abandoned buildings.
“I learned how to use a camera back in 2002, working in a surveillance unit and just trying to take photographs of guys doing crime,” Boyle said. “It was learning under fire. If you don’t get the exposure or the shutter speed right, you’re going to miss evidence that could put somebody in jail. So I got pretty proficient at that.”
New this year is a pop-up studio at Progress Lab. The pilot project gives artists who don’t have a public-facing space somewhere to show their work.
“It’s about trying to make the Crawl more accessible and inclusive,” said Sierra MacTavish, Eastside Arts Society Artist Coordinator.
“It’s addressing a few things. Space in our city is limited. We’re always looking at new ways we can make sure we’re including artists who are producing in different spaces but still part of this community.” As the largest creative hub in the Crawl, the Parker Street Studios is always a top draw. Boyle started working out of a studio there this year.
“It’s my first time being in Parker Street for the Crawl. I live out in White Rock, so getting to have a studio in town was something that I meant to do.”
He’ll be showing “a mix of everything,” he said, including a few photos from his Elemental series. He describes the images, which are bird’s-eye views of mountain ranges, as “aerial abstract work.”
He doesn’t use drones.
“I prefer the old-fashioned way of hanging out of a helicopter or plane,” he said. “A heavy-lift drone to get my camera gear up is just too expensive. The elevation that I’m going are inaccessible otherwise. I’m out in the middle of a Garibaldi range at 8,000 feet. It’s not like I can get a drone up there.”
Other series, Range and Daysleeper, document buildings that he says “were once important, like mom-and-pop stores.”
“A lot of them are disappearing because there’s not enough business to come through. The nighttime series, Daysleeper, treats them almost like architectural portraiture, in a romantic kind of way.”
He used to find his subjects just by driving aimlessly, he says. “While that was kind of cool, and I got into some great adventures, it wasn’t very efficient.”
Now he just drops himself “in the middle of nowhere on Google Maps and start driving the roadways, just clicking and dragging through these towns until I find buildings that match what I’m looking for.”
One of the most striking of these is a movie theatre in small-town Saskatchewan. The theatre’s white, art deco-ish facade is strikingly offset by the inky blackness surrounding it.
“The theatre was shut down for a long time, and the town has kind of rallied around it, and people have started to fix it up,” said Boyle, an ex-Winnipeger.
“It’s still got the beautiful old face, and it’s right in the middle of the street with nothing around it. It’s just a cool, iconic Prairie building.”
His art and his police work feed off each other, he says.
“I think the job enhances my ability to do art because it gives me a different perspective. And art makes me a better police officer, because it gives me a bit more empathy, and a bit more creativity when it comes to problem-solving. They’re strange mix, but they balance each other out.”
