SANATEE — Basket Books & Art Gallery

Stephanie Boone:
SANATEE
March 28 - May 17, 2026

The artist's work is material amalgamation and transformation. Much as the aggregates of sand, gravel and crushed stone are compressed together into concrete, Stephanie Boone employs the aftereffects of experience—what might be, and all that we slough off on the path of life—as the core components of her work. With a gravity of purpose, her materials, collected and saved (in some instances for decades), are jammed up in succession and reanimated, freshly charged. Haunted by presences both familial and unfamiliar, her amalgams are a conjuration of life, its beauties and deficiencies. In this bringing together, the work is an evocation of natural laws, of matter, always porous and in motion through time—the slow decomposition of one thing into another, the dispersion and bodily absorption of synthetic particulates and metals. In this, the intent and effect of Boone’s gestures are big, even cosmological, while also always deeply personal in every decision, placement, and attachment.

The work shares affinities with junk drawers, knickknack shelves, artists like Danny McDonald or Yuji Agematsu, but maybe most with memory ware, a folk-art tradition in which objects of varying importance to the maker are pressed onto a container as a form of preservation—holding the idea that time can be embedded in an object as a form of capture, a phantasmal catch-all. Things—the individual parts in the giant mess of the world—accrue meaning, even if only subjectively. One develops a relationship with the inanimate, generating an adherence that serves to bond the intangibility of memory to form, and form is funny business: its job is to inflect perception, freighting the thing. It is that ineffable turn that inters when an object becomes un-discardable because it is too saturated with meaning. Why do we hang on?

Central to this presentation is a thick-linked chain that stretches across the gallery, hooked to two opposing walls, to which an accumulation of many of these loaded artifacts are fixed, hanging from its horizontal axis. These things are predominately human made, but there is organic material too (another work made almost entirely of ocotillo towers nearby). Counter to the way time inheres (or adheres) in memory ware—all at once (and also like a tumbleweed)—the chain projects a linear casualty. Despite our personal dependencies, this succession provides an accumulative interior experience where one encounter leads to the next, informed by material objects that one must read for a meaning that might inform one’s next inquiry. It is investigation, not excavation, that we employ to make legible our encounter, and absent direct experience we make sense by inference, crafting narratives informed by all that’s left behind.

But neither is this work of storytelling a neat chronology: the syntax of this chain, arrayed like a sequence of charms, has the effect of a spell, working an alchemical transformation of the materials’ spotty histories. If these materials are charged—as dynamic, vibrant matter, per Jane Bennett—they are also hovering on the brink of their next stage. Boone does not collect and arrange in order to preserve in a fixed form; her orchestration of truly ephemeral assemblages harnesses the power of these objects as they shift into their next state of being.

Stephanie Boone (b. 1981, Texas City, TX) lives in Houston. For the last two decades, her work has taken many forms, including jewelry, ceramics, photography, zine making, design, and a relentless collecting practice that she reconfigures into her collage and sculpture. She has contributed to Kingsboro Press and F Magazine. SANATEE is her first solo exhibition.

Documentation and checklist forthcoming.

For inquiries and available works contact info@basket-books.com