Symbols take on new meaning in works by Victoria Boone
Release Date: 6/13/2008. Expired: 7/26/2008
As a teen, Victoria Boone kept her diary in the vocabulary of symbols, hoping that her mother would not decipher her secret language. More than three decades later, she is still journaling in symbols, only on canvas instead of the pages of a diary.
Boone’s symbol-oriented paintings will be displayed in the Visual Arts Gallery at The Renaissance Center June 19-July 26. An opening reception will be 6-7:30 p.m. Friday, June 20.
Many of the artists who come through the galleries of The Renaissance Center have a connection to one of the more popular annual exhibitions: the Renaissance Regional Art Exhibition. Boone is no different.
Jurors selected works by Boone for the 4th and 5th annual RRAEs and she has since frequented the center on many occasions and become a loyal viewer of its artistic endeavors.
“What sets Victoria apart, though, is her artistic career outside of these walls,” said Armon Means, gallery curator at The Renaissance Center. “While the RRAE is often an introduction to the art world for many artists, for Victoria is was merely a stepping stone in the vast exhibition and art instruction career she has built for herself.”
An adjunct instructor and gallery director herself, she has served on the faculty of many of Nashville’s universities while exhibiting widely across the state and beyond. Entrenched in the Southeast, she has shown with such institutions as the Brooks Museum, Tennessee State Museum, Vanderbilt, Knoxville Museum of Art and the Parthenon. Not to mention she has shown as extensively in private galleries such as La Mano in Los Angeles, Ca.
“One of the things that makes Victoria’s work so exciting is also her ability as a painter to create works which are simultaneously educational, thought provoking and aesthetically engaging,” Means said. “Her recent body of work explores ideas of symbology and string theory, combining them into a unique idea that examines relationships of both the physical and metaphysical worlds. Her diverse history of painting styles and experimentation on the canvas surface has clearly transformed here into a direct and purposeful use of the dual languages of visual and written cultures, yet allowing them to work together to form a new and fresh view. Victoria once again proves that she is neither timid nor fearful of trying something new with her work and once again comes out on the top of her game.”
“I am a semiologist. And, yes, I am neurotic too,” Boone said. “But my love of symbols is far stronger than my neuroses -- any of them. Semiology is not a dogma. Duality is the essential, dynamic contrast that creates the reliable, fresh context transmitting meaning to all those wishing to understand them.
“My examination of historical signs and hieroglyphics creates an evolving language that is a fusion of multiple cultures and different periods of history. By crossing these boundaries, I sometimes become disoriented, even lost. But then, intuitively, a new and greater synthesis is found. My private symbols allow me to question and examine the physical, mental and spiritual interactions and disconnections, in a new way and with a different language.”
Like the prehistoric totems on the cave walls by the Cro-Magnon people, which functioned as visual communication, or the gematria used by the post-Talmudic scholars, which gave numerical meanings to words and sentences, Boone hopes her symbols will serve to deconstruct the rigid daily underpinning of order and set the imagination free.
“By the way, I now know that my Mother never even knew I had a diary,” said Boone. “In fact, she now finds her own meanings in my secret language.”
Boone holds a Master’s Degree in Museum Administration from the University of Oklahoma and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama.
She started her art career more than 30 years ago as a muralist for the 1982 World’s Fair.
Boone is the director of the Leu Art Gallery at Belmont University. She also teaches drawing courses and a senior capstone course on business in the visual arts at Belmont University. Over the last 10 years, Boone’s long-time affection for teaching art has been shared during her professorships at Middle Tennessee State University and Austin Peay State University.
For more information on the exhibit of Victoria Boone’s paintings in the Visual Arts Gallery June 19-July 26, contact Means at (615) 740-5545 or armon.means@rcenter.org.
Galleries at The Renaissance Center are open 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Saturday and admission is free.
The Renaissance Center is a fine arts education and performing arts center at 855 Highway 46 South in Dickson, just 35 miles west of Nashville on Interstate 40 at exit 172. For more information, call (615) 740-5600 or visit www.rcenter.org.
Visit the Visual Arts Gallery page for more about the gallery.
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