In several large pieces, Boozer has splashed slip into a frame, transforming the liquid clay, for a moment, into a sort of prehistoric paint, much like our ancestors in Alta Mira did. She then has encouraged the clay’s natural tendency to crack and bend and create lines. This is where randomness, aided by her creative hand, comes to play. In others, she mixes porcelain slip, or stoneware, tar and steel.
In the end, and when hung vertically, we are offered a surprisingly elegant and visually challenging work of two dimensional art that breaks the barrier into three dimensions. The eye is sometimes fooled, especially when one looks at the pieces closely, into seeing an earthy painting – much what an abstract expressionist would deliver. Step back a foot or two, and you are looking at an aerial photograph of a rich desert, full or dried rivers, gorges and hills. In “The Present is the Key to the Past,” she has even spray painted a straight bluish line, almost resembling a road. The duality of the effect is brilliant – and because the manipulation of the media is driven by the randomness of the result – unexpectedly recognizable as a variety of subject matter that crosses genres between representation and abstraction, and painting and sculpture.
In a second series of works (Intrusion series), Boozer removed chunks of dried tar that accumulates over the years in the guts of those stinky tar trucks that are always fixing up street cracks. The resulting forms are surprisingly sensual and organic.
Here again, the effect of randomness is complimented by the artist’s sharp detection of the visual magnetism of these unexpected forms. Created by the ordained rotation of the tar truck’s mixing mechanism over a period of years, and dried by the off and on process of the mixer’s heating system, these forms are surprisingly interesting to the eye.
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