As an undergrad at the Rhode Island School of Design, Mark Booth tried to write poetry after smoking pot for the first time, and all his Rs came out backward. His mom told him he’d been diagnosed with mild dyslexia as a child, and that’s why he’d been in a special reading group in first grade. Booth recalled being given sheets of paper that were half lined and half blank so he could draw a picture, then write a little story underneath. “I’ve always felt somewhat outside of words, a little on the periphery of language,” he says. Yet ever since that time, when he remembers making his first serious efforts to draw, his creative projects have involved language, whether he was making comic books as a kid or improvising music, as he does today in the local band Tiny Hairs.
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The 50-some untitled paintings and drawings in his show at Bodybuilder & Sportsman (which also includes three of his sound pieces) all place sentences or phrases in biomorphic balloons. The provocative texts often allude to the body, and their juxtapositions can be so weird and incongruous that logical explanations fail. In one piece, the balloon items include “by the dew covered genitals of our lord,” “the obstacle to our happiness lay malevolently on the floor boards in a halo of its own fluids,” and “I choose pink.” Accompanying these words is a tangle of lines resembling hair.
Some pieces in the show seem to reflect on American culture, including one that apparently alludes to weather reporting. Among its texts are “The weatherman practiced expressions of uncertainty,” “The rain falls later perhaps,” and “x ray newscast.” Booth says that he sees television news as “such a fabrication, such theater,” and he hoped showing it in what he calls X-ray form (there are also balloons reading “cloud forms” and “hoar frost”) might both “humanize the newscasters and make them more surreal.”
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