Viewfinders Dropin Experience Contemporary Arts Museum Houston December 14

On View: Nov 9, 2019 - February 16, 2020

When:

Nov 9, 2019 – Feb xv, 2020 all-day

2019-xi-09T00:00:00-06:00

2020-02-16T00:00:00-06:00

Where:

THE NINA AND MICHAEL ZILKHA GALLERY

Will Boone: The Highway Hex explores the space and time between California and Texas, the Los Angeles River, Interstate 10, why people go out Texas and why they come dorsum. The Highway Hex is the first solo museum exhibition of Houston-built-in and Los Angeles-based creative person Will Boone,featuring all new works created for this presentation, including a site-specific installation, paintings, and sculptures.

The title of the exhibition refers to a bizarre medical condition called highway hypnosis, or "white line fever," where a driver enters an altered mental state and can operate a car for great distances in a safe manner with no retentivity of doing and so. Similarly, the exhibition traverses the vast landscape—both concrete and psychological—between Texas and California. The Highway Hex is a site-specific exhibition at CAMH featuring the artist's outset long-form video alongside new sculptures and paintings. The narrative video, titled Sugariness Perfume, may be read simultaneously as a self-portrait, a portrait of a geographical region, and a portrait that redirects the possibilities of an infamous picture character. The video questions what it means to revisit your roots when both you and the identify you are from have changed.

Boone has written, directed, and produced Sweet Perfume and its original score with a loose narrative centered around the iconic grapheme Leatherface, lifted from the 1974 horror picture show The Texas Chainsaw Massacre directed by Tobe Hooper. Inspired by fan fiction, Sweet Perfume gives "Face," played by Boone's wife and artist Stephanie Boone, a new personal trajectory. She portrays the chainsaw-less monster, excised from the context of a horror picture, living peacefully in the hills overlooking East Los Angeles. The artist is fascinated by the magnetic pull of Southern California that seems to attract those who do not fit in elsewhere: the outsiders and the dreamers. Boone said, "the video is almost someone dealing with who they are—the intersection of who they have been and who they want to exist. It's also about the mind-warping physical space between Houston and Los Angeles: 1,500 miles on Interstate 10 through the desert. El Paso is half way."

Fueled by his years based in Los Angeles, Boone is interested in film props and exploring how an object is imbued with meaning and mythology. Relatedly, The Highway Hex will include sculptures the artist has employed as props in the motion-picture show, such as a homemade jukebox that only plays George Jones, which the creative person sees as both an homage to the country singer and an instrument of torture, "depending on who you ask."

Many of Boone'south sculptures reflect his penchant for employing techniques developed outside of a fine arts framework, such as model building, automotive painting, and sign making. Along these lines, The Highway Hex features a neon-lit, twenty-pes-long wooden model of the Los Angeles River, a symbol of his current environs, too as a new series of large-scale aggregation paintings incorporating plant objects and bar top resin. Boone refers to these as "Arterials", because of their relationship to the highway, specifically Interstate 10, and their sanguine color, which is similar to the kitschy stage claret used in the slasher motion-picture show genre.

Boone continues to investigate themes salient to his artistic practice, such as unconventional portraiture and storytelling through inspiration drawn by the narrative traditions of the South. "Storytelling is a manner that people understand their existence," Boone explained. The narrative elements of The Highway Hex are especially influenced by the work of a lineage of fellow Texans, including Lightnin' Hopkins, Richard Linklater, Terry Allen, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roky Erikson. Boone said, "It ways a lot to me to be taking this stride forward as an creative person [with my first museum prove], and simultaneously to be able to render to a identify that I care about securely. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, it's a little chip like the Twilight Zone."

"Continuing CAMH'due south commitment to championing artists before in their career, I am thrilled to work with Will Boone on his first solo museum presentation," said Patricia Restrepo, the exhibition curator. "The vast array of entry points into his work—including playful considerations of materiality, a celebration of CAMH'southward geographic site, an exploration of our regional cultural capital, and a metaphorical search for understanding home and what returning home can entail—will resonate with our various publics."

Will Boone: The Highway Hex is curated by Patricia Restrepo, CAMH Exhibitions Director and Assistant Curator.

Support

Volition Boone: The Highway Hex is made possible in role by back up received from Karma, New York, New York, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, California. Sectional media sponsorship of the exhibition is provided by Arts and Civilization, Texas Magazine.

About the Artist

Will Boone has been featured in solo exhibitions at David Kordansky, Los Angeles, Karma, New York, and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida. A major installation was featured in Desert X 2017, Coachella Valley, California. Recent group shows include Zombies: Pay Attending!, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; White Trash, Luhring Augustine Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York; Prototypology, Gagosian Gallery, Rome, Italian republic; Fétiche, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, New York; and In Dissimilar Means, Almine Rech, London, Uk. Boone received his BFA in painting from the Academy of Houston, Texas. He currently lives and works in Southern California and Central Texas.

Publication

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue co-published past Karma and CAMH, and designed past An Art Service. Considered a reader's companion to the show, the publication will feature Boone'southward Sweet Perfume screenplay, a previously unpublished short story by Randy Kennedy, a story past Pilar Tompkins Rivas, and an essay past Patricia Restrepo, also as plates, installation images, and reproductions of related material from the artist's archives.

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Source: https://camh.org/event/will-boone-highway-hex/

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