Will Boone. No Man's Land.

About

No Man’s Land is a scenic exhibition that began for Will Boone with an encounter at a swap meet in 2017. Among a menagerie of figurines, toys, horror movie monsters, and busts of United States presidents and music legends, Boone found resonance with sculptures of antiquity. Medusa and Julius Caesar were swapped for Frankenstein and John F. Kennedy; dinged-up plastic and flaking enamel paint took the place of chipped marble and weathered bronze. 

In more than forty works, Boone transforms relics of Americana into bronze statues. Like a model toy, Boone hand-paints each with enamel paint, producing a brushy and vibrant surface. Amidst cacti and aloes, a tiger and a barking dog have a standoff at the gallery’s center. A rabbit leaps across a skull and an eagle hangs from the ceiling. A vulture perches on a rock, surveying bones. Several works are deliberately paired together, forming tableaus: a rat and a ribcage, a dinosaur and a tree stump, a spider’s web amidst barren branches, a cactus and a foot. A sculpture hall sourced from the desert of American culture, the exhibition marks the first time this body of work will be shown in its entirety. 

To Donald Judd, Texas famously offered a “featureless landscape,” an empty space that harmonized with his sculptural practice. For Boone, Texas is “featured”—defined by cultural artifacts, by its specificities, by a chorus of oddities, exemplified in the roadside attractions and strange monuments through which small towns assert themselves against the monotony Judd embraced. Boone’s bronze sculptures are made in Bastrop, a small town, home to a gas station barbecue joint featured in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a foundry that produces statues and roadside attractions. 

Bronze ensures that Boone’s figures will last far into the future, where they will become relics in their own right. This vastness of time attains a symmetrical spatiality with the vastness of the desert. In doing so, Boone reminds us that his sculptures’ bright exteriors will eventually fade, rusting into the inexorable unknown, into No Man’s Land.