A Drop Filled with Memories, 2022 (Poster)

Exhibition poster for:

Craig Boagey
‘A Drop Filled with Memories’
10/29 → 11/19 2022
West Hollywood


Press Release:

Simchowitz is pleased to present A Drop Filled with Memories Craig Boagey’s first solo show in our West Hollywood location. While at first glance this body of work may appear to be a departure from his practice to-date, a deep ideological interconnectivity underlies Boagey’s interpretations—these monumental paintings serve to challenge a deeper, more visceral relational human experience. Juxtaposing the World Wide Web and the mycelium networks mushrooms make, Boagey interweaves a poetic symbology alluring to the notion of sexualizing our world. A constructed reality opposed to innocence emerges through the artist’s practice of stylizing the works by a process of applying mist and liquid strokes in order to soften or filter the image.

Initially creating the compositions for the work digitally, Boagey notes that for him, the process of chance in creation takes place prior to paint even being applied. In deliberating the feeling state he aims to evoke, the artist informs the material direction of his process, creating an almost mythical relationship to nature.

The allure of technological embodiment seeps from Boagey’s paintings, the nearly commercial slickness blurring the edges of what we understand to be real, how we emote and engage with information and one another. Pushing against the edges of acceptability (particularly as it pertains to internet censorship) with the bodily, viscous, nearly pervasive sexuality of the phallocentric mushrooms he paints, Boagey begs the question of whether we are even capable of rendering the amount of information we intake online—that the conflation of the cultural hyper-sexualization of the everyday and the idyllic purity found in nature might in fact evince an interior discord plaguing the contemporary human psyche on a greater, more existential scale. A Drop Filled with Memories runs from October 29th-November 19th, 2022 with an opening reception from 4PM-6PM on Saturday, October 29th, 2022.

Craig Boagey (b. 1985, Liverpool, UK) is a contemporary artist who predominantly works in the form of painting and drawing. Combining various paint mediums, Boagey’s creative preoccupations revolve around enticing, succulent, fleshy, sometimes erotic, occasionally perverse subject matter. Often using nature, in particular mushrooms, as a vehicle or device, Boagey sorts to discuss and examine human behaviourism and our social interrelations with each other and the world around us. The paintings are laboriously executed with a precise virtuosity, often referencing theology, mythology, poetry and the occult. Essentially, Boagey’s work aims to discuss, dissect and question humanity’s cognitive relationship with the earth, technology, and itself.

Boagey currently resides in London, United Kingdom. He received his BA in 2008 from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts.