Phoebe Boswell is on a roll.
Her exhibition, For Every Real Word Spoken, had just opened in London’s Tiwani
Gallery when it was announced that she’d won the Special Prize at the Future
Generation Art Prize 2017.
Worth £20 000, the prize is for Mutumia her 2016 interactive installation which
the jury described as “virtuoso life drawings, female figures, animated on an epic
scale”.
Her latest exhibition, For Every Real Word Spoken, displays more of this
virtuosity. Boswell has drawn six near-life portraits of friends and acquaintances,
each of which is shown holding a device with its screen to the viewer.
This was inspired by Food For The Spirit, the collection of self-taken nude and
near-nude photographs by Adrian Piper, the American conceptual artist.
While Piper was her own subject, suggesting self-examination, Boswell has opted
for a choral assembly of women of which one is transgender. The screens held by
each woman has a code, hand drawn by Boswell, which when scanned with a
mobile phone, reveals a particular item important to and chosen by the women.The revelations include a Youtube video of Maya Angelou reciting her poem
“phenomenal women” and a live recording of a concert by the Voices of East
Harlem.
On an adjoining white wall, are the names of the women who have been
important to Boswell from family members to public personalities as a figurative
way of marking the lives and achievements of black women in the “white”
contexts they’ve had to do so.
For Every Real Word Spoken is a crowning achievement for the thoughtful and
inventive ways Boswell has investigated the lives of her subjects and womanhood
in general.