Alvin Booth
"Come to Your Senses"

Exhibition: November 14, 2013 – January 11, 2014

"Come to Your Senses" subordinates the conventionally erotic. No longer a product of the body’s allure, beguilement becomes a side effect of function over form and sensation over the purely visual. A key undercurrent of Booth’s work, artifice assumes new configurations: sometimes a device of play, sometimes a cautionary allusion to the hazards of misrepresentation and assumption. Booth’s provocations and insistence on an atmosphere of ‘Do Touch’ combine here to introduce an element ludic Investigation… The restless drive of Booth’s earlier expressions of the body resist the absolute, yet the transgressions of Come To Your Senses sound a note of the provisional that is neither faltering nor thin.

When asked in an early interview about the photographers who had influenced him the most, Booth listed three sculptors: Rodin, Aristide Maillol, and Gaston Lachaise. As a photographer, Booth finds his focus through the body, a constant that is apparent in his directional shift from photography to sculpture.

While still a raw celebration of the human form at its vital peak, the current work of "Come To Your Senses" introduces a simmering suggestion of loss. In hyperbolic huddles of ears, noses, fingers, and lips, Booth finds humor in the disconnect between the realistic divorced from the real, the essential divorced from its molded replica.

Booth’s expired hearing aid batteries form bold multiplicities that speak to the singularly human capacity for invention and adaptation. No longer external components furtively inserted into the body to shore up a diminished sensory capacity, the silvery studs become an idealized female nude. Their collective imperfection transcends limitation for as long as the eye can maintain its unblinking gaze.