Vergissmeinnicht, Samuel Boehm - April 29 - June 3
Patrice Rushen’s Forget Me Nots played at least five or ten times a day in my house growing up and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I got this particular pressing in West Virginia at a place called Bubba’s Garage, a junk store that became a sort of hangout for my friends in college. We were really terrible customers, actually— we were around so often that Bubba would end up just giving us anything we liked for free or for less than he paid for it. Like any number of things I got there, it probably moved in and out of four different studios and mostly just gathered dust.
So I finally framed it. I worked for a framer in Brooklyn who was slowly reframing JPMorgan’s whole collection as needed. I would keep all the old aluminum frames because they struck me as super dated and totally ubiquitous at the same time. I cut the mat there too on this big fancy machine that I helped install, and I left the plastic corners visible because that’s something a framer would normally never do.
That Patrice Rushen song also served as the name of my show at Sue’s place. It mostly consisted of these star paintings that I obsess over. We humans draw stars in a way that looks like us, with five points, four limbs and a face. Like those frames and that song, there’s just something about them, you know? So I added one of those to the back of the mat.
You probably can’t gather any of this by looking at the thing. I like to think that it’s all in there anyway, like Hemingway’s iceberg theory or something. A lot of times when strangers visit the studio they end up saying something like, “this all seems very personal.” In my head I’m always like, “well, yeah, if art isn’t that, then what is it?”
-Samuel Boehm
