Through March 5th, Andrea Rosen Gallery will feature a dual exhibition of Pope.L and Will Boone. Both conceptual artists will occupy the three-room Chelsea space with respective video installations, sculptures, and paintings.
At a preview last month, Pope.L discussed his ontological fascination with words by divulging the inspiration behind some of his pieces, notably, Cone in a Forest and Cone for My Sister (Private Language Problem) (2015), a large cone installation made of wooden sculpted letters.
2016
“You know, the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, he wrote this novel called Correction about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sister in which there is this philosopher figure who is making a cone in the forest for his sister and he wants the cone to be correct. If you read the novel there is only one period and that’s the one in the end. It’s like a pile language. What would that be? What would it look like? … That’s what this thing is,” said Pope.L.
Other works included Pope.L’s wall-bound sculptural and video pieces. Similarly using imagery and image technologies in opposition to words, his works Syllogism (T-Version) (2015) and Theater of Brechtangles (2015) integrate videos into sculptures that seem to be making formal structural sense within the system of logic, while also deforming and abstracting as a means to get at expression, thereby also defying these logical systems.
Courtesy of the artists and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Pope.L noted, “In the works in which I use language, there is a desire to communicate some things… but at the same time there is a desire to express something difficult to get at with language…or there is my desire in the work to say several things in a squabble—it’s the squabble I want sometimes.”
On his end ,Boone, whose work is also featured in ongoing and upcoming group exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery in Rome, Venus in New York, and Almine Rech in London, discussed the process behind his “Dog Houses” sculptural installations, Born to sleep in the sun I, II and III, (2015) respectively.
Courtesy of Pope.L
“I was driving around in my new L.A neighborhood and basically someone put a doghouse on the curb. It was a Sunday afternoon, I knew the trash would be collecting Monday morning, so I stopped the car, took a picture of it and drove away. [Later] I drove back and it was still there. I decided to put it in the car. I guess I hadn’t seen a doghouse in a long time,” Boone remembered. “It’s funny to think about space and just discerning that now I’m back in a place where dogs have houses. What does it mean to be in that landscape? I took it to my studio and started this interrogation, how they do it? Why they do it? I kept trying to go inside it, what was going on in there?”
Boone’s doghouses are decorated with various personal collections, from mosaic Slayer carnival mirrors to Charles Bronson photographs. His “Gate” paintings expand on the subjectivity of perspective and the concurring of ideas of security and confinement. Boone draws attention to how the communicated information on a given surface can blind one to the reading of its content.
Pope.L Will Boone
Andrea Rosen said that while her dialogue with each artist had been autonomous and distinct, the intention of the exhibition was both to highlight the artists’ independent visions and reveal their uncanny overlaps.
“Each [artist has] a direct fascination with source,” said Rosen. Their studios are filled with information. And while sometimes that material was radically different, I was overwhelmed to find commonality, for instance, the same book in both places, The Poetics of the New American Poetry [Leroi Jones,1973]…Which is emblematic of so much that each think about: America, place, politics, the creativity and fluidity of language, how the same words can be constantly reconstructed to describe anew. The work is saturated with content.”
Installation view
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Pope.L and Will Boone will be on view through March 5.
