Held in dozens of private and public collections around the world, the works of textual pop artist John Boone originate with a hand-painted digital alphabet inspiring meditations on everything from language to work. Boone’s unique aesthetic will be on display when Mystic Museum of Art presents Pairs, an exhibition in MMoA’s Liebig Gallery which will feature six related pairs of Boone’s paintings and mixed-media. Special to MMoA’s show will be Time Pieces-Free Time and Time Zones, which will include a still image under a reflective plexiglass where the viewer’s image resides alongside an eight-minute program with 200 idioms about time. Other works will explore work, numbers, and the simple word “Oh.”
A New Jersey native, who studied at Earlham College in Indiana and, later a series of art schools, Boone now splits his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Stonington, Connecticut, where he maintains a studio at the Velvet Mill. Boone designs on a computer but then paints his canvases entirely by hand, requiring remarkable detail and patience painting hundreds of letters. Perhaps the most interesting duality of Boone’s work resides in the digital alphabet itself, which Boone says is always the constant and arbiter of any work. The letters evoke the future, but it’s a soft archaic future of Tron, Atari, and the primitive computers that were all a precursor to current ideas about modernity. By doing this, gravity is set against levity as we consider the future we remember against the future we are yet to encounter, and in that is a nostalgia that sends us backward at the same time we hurtle forward.
Opening Reception
Thursday, September 28, 5:30pm – 7pm
 

John Boone, Work Color, 2013, Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 48 inches.
 

John Boone, Work Grey, 2013, Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 48 inches.