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Wayne Boyer

Wayne Boyer is a filmmaker based on Chicago. Wayne is born in 1937 and he went to Lane Technology High School and the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Wayne Boyer worked at the one of Chicago’s leading graphic design studios called Millie and Morton Goldsholl Association. He created a new genre of design-based films in advertising with Morton and Millie Goldsholl who established Goldsholl Design and Film Associates. After, he helped found an artist-run film which is ‘Center Cinema Film Co-op’ and he started to teach and develop art programs at Chicago universities.

Wayne’s Process

Wayne basically explored visual abstraction through technical mastery and appropriation. Wayne’s work approached historically rooted subject matter with unbelievably precise skill. Also, his work contained many environment imageries.

Wayne Boyer’s Film

1. Drop City (Wayne Boyer, 1968, 16mm., Color, Sound, 5 min.) An experimental documentary on Drop City, a famous counterculture artists’ community once located near Trinidad, Colorado. Inspired by the architectural ideas of Buckminster Fuller and Steve Baer, residents of the commune constructed geodesic domes out of salvaged materials – culled lumber, bottle caps and chopped-out car tops. Drop City became a lab for experimental building, and in 1966 Fuller himself honored Drop City with his Dymaxion Award for “poetically economic structural accomplishments.” Boyer made the film with only two 100′ rolls of 16mm film, each roll being run through the camera twice, each pass with a different mask in front of the camera. The result of these precise techniques is a dynamic superimposed tour of one of the first rural communes of the 1960s.

2. The Building: Chicago Stock Exchange (Wayne Boyer, 1975, 16mm, color, sound, 12 min.) A documentary on the 1972 demolition of the landmark Adler & Sullivan-designed building at 30 North LaSalle Street. Architect John Vinci, photographer & preservationist Richard Nickel and others discuss the Adler & Sullivan building, its destruction, and the acquisition of the Board of Trade room by the Art Institute of Chicago. The film is dedicated to Richard Nickel, who died tragically during the demolition of the building.

3. Agamemnon in New York (Wayne Boyer & Larry Janiak, 1964, 16mm, b&w, sound., 4.5 min.) What started as a film test on new sync-sound film equipment quickly became a short film documenting the typical nuttiness behind the scenes at Goldsholl Design & Film Associates, a Chicago-based design firm that employed both Boyer and Janiak. Janiak ad libs alone, as no one else would come out from the behind the camera. Shot by Wayne Boyer and edited by Janiak, a home movie.

4. George & Martha Revisited (Wayne Boyer, 1967, 16mm, B&W, Sound, 8 min.) Still images of action and gesture from Mike Nichols’ WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? are used to transform Edward Albee’s characters into the haunting shells of people they have become. To achieve this stunning effect, Boyer re-photographed the entire feature using a specially made camera that slowly recorded images off of the screen. This one minute of film was then expanded to eight minutes, resulting in a re-examination of the entire structure of a feature film – dramatic line, duration relationships and a particulate disassembly of the frames themselves.