PATRICIA L. BOYD
CONTENTS IN THE STORAGE PROBLEM

These boxes were used in actual house moves, filled with my belongings and transported several times, between several places. But in this exhibition, in their holding of contents, the boxes are reconstructions or representations of interiority. A box is used to store and shift things, acts as a framing structure, and can be breached. There is an outside.

Although they’ve found a resting place as art, they are still on the move, with elements migrating between boxes from one exhibition to another—or removed or changed and new ones added. When I set out to use the moving boxes as material for work, I wanted to make a system that was inherently unstable.

References to beds recur, and with different meanings. Some document the making of a previous group of sculptures, Where You Lie, made from dismembered pieces of the bed from my former marriage, in which a piece of furniture I had slept in for years became properly observed through a surgical action. Other depictions of beds in the exhibition refer to years I spent bedridden due to illness. A horizontal position tends to enable a person to feel less in charge, more receptive and prone to associative drift, anxieties, daydreams.

To cut is to make an incision. A vitrine is a kind of cut in that it isolates contents away from the rest of the world and attempts to hold them outside of time, protected from dust and decay. Each time I put the boxes away I cut the tape, and each time I re-use them I apply more.

PLB, 20.03.2025