ART-PRESENTATION: William Pope.L & Will Boone

Two American artists of different generations William Pope.L and Will Boone, show their work together. Their exhibition highlights the work of each artist independently, allowing their juxtaposition to simultaneously foster connections, both in content and aesthetics, and at the same time allow the viewer to see each artist’s work through a new and potentially heightened filter.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Andrea Rosen Gallery Archive

While language is essential on the practice of both artists, both share an incredible ability to transform language or imagery with equal grace into the poetics of a purely visual yet rigorously embedded experience… The work is saturated with content. William’s Pope.L presentation includes three significant bodies of work, comprising wall bound, sculptural and video works. While the “Skin Set” series is already a distillation of a history of content, also included in the show is a newer body of work, Pope.L’s cut-out panels are a further evolution that take lists of some thousand plus titles from that series and materialize them, becoming their own concentrated and further abstracted source of language and poetry. Similarly using imagery and image technologies in opposition to words, his works “Syllogism (T-Version)” and “Theater of Brechtangles” integrate videos into sculptures that seem to make a formal, structural sense within the system of logic, but simultaneously deform and abstract as a means to get at expression. Positing language and imagery as a container, Pope.L attempts to draw our attention to the traditions and tensions inherent in formal structures by creating malleability and by interacting with mixed messages. Will Boone has always commanded a multi-disciplinary practice. The two new bodies of work are on presentation “Gate” painting series, and new body of sculptures referred to as “Doghouses” are a clear continuation of previous works, as it has always been at the core of Boone’s intention to create systems to assimilate the breadth of his interests, to arrive at abstraction that is “Bigger than myself.” Each work embodies history, both collective and personal. Within his fascination with source, Boone is interested in how particular arrangements and the accumulation of materials that are clearly part of a larger cultural fabric are what construct personal histories, and how reconfiguring these arrangements creates open vessels for new intention. His “Doghouse” series were developed from the seed of a single doghouse found in the streets of Los Angeles, they are vessels for an identity or person, investigating interior vs. exterior relationships and concepts of projection. The structures shift between bare shelters and emulated human environments that, like the paintings, slip between source and abstracted surface. His “Gate” paintings expand on the subjectivity of perspective and coinciding ideas of confinement and protection, drawing our attention to how the distinct communication of information on a surface can obscure and abstract our reading of content.

Info: Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 30/1-5/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.andrearosengallery.com