David Nolan Gallery, November 1–December 21, 2024, New York

The presentation of four tire-based works from different periods in Booker’s career—and a concurrent public art project (Shaved Portions [2024]) on view at Broadway and West 39th St—traces the gradual expansion of her practice from the gallery wall to the viewer’s space, and further, into urban and social environments. In the earliest work on display, Untitled (1996), a wooden picture frame struggles to contain the swarm of deconstructed tires, whose feverish contortions make Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings seem decorative. Already heralded in this work is the material’s inevitable growth out of the apparatus of painting—as in Empty Seat—into real space, as in the biomorphic cluster of Bottom Half (2008) and Strayed (2019), where strips of tires hang loose from a metal prop, draping, curling, and spilling onto the floor.

— Nov. 2024, The Brooklyn Rail

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