For this exhibition, Boggio Sella traveled to Burkina Faso, West Africa bringing with him images and textbooks on the subject of Astronomy. These materials included among other images of the sun and stars, photographs of the 1969 American moon landing (an event that is often referred to as mankind’s greatest technological achievement of all time). For a population living in one of the most impoverished and remote areas on earth, seeing these pictures (most for the first time) and entertaining the astonis hing idea of man’s abilities to travel to the moon led to a series of interviews and commissions/collaborations with the artist.

The results are presented in a salon fashion that integrates a new series of paintings made by Boggio Sella in New York with sculpture, batiks and bogolans (mudcloth), created by local artisans in Africa. These custom made fabric pieces and sculptures are hybrids that retain the shapes and style of traditional “African” art while depicting new iconographies inspired by Boggio Sella’s introduction of ideas and fantasies of moon landings and space exploration. The moon is, of course, the second biggest and most visible object in the sky (next to the sun) and has therefore become a universal symbol to all religions and cultures fraught with provincial, religious, nationalistic and personal associations. Boggio Sella carefully funnels the emotions and poetics of this powerful symbol into a series of works that suggest a univer sal need for inspiration, exploration and (re)discovery.

Also on view are indigenous artifacts and objects obtained by Boggio Sella from shamans in the village’s markets and presented here in a ceremonial series of vitrines. The majority of these objects are tools for fortification, protection, meditation and psychological/physical sustenance. They are for the most part spiritual, healing objects meant to guard one on the journey of day-to-day life and something that could potentially be essential to a long and grueling trip (whether physical or metaphysical). Among these indigenous artifacts and objects, Boggio Sella has placed his own hand-fashioned objects out of organic materials such as earth, clay and hemp.

From an art historical perspective, Boggio Sella’s work can be seen as an exploration of the art historical implications of the avant-garde’s origins in conceptual ideas of primitivism. From a formalist point of view, the initial influence of primitivism seen in late 19th century and early 20th century works by Gaugin, Picabia and Picasso can be seen as a “back to basics” approach to making art following the excesses of Romanticism and Impressionism. Following this line of thought one could view the progression of early-mid 20th century modernism into postmodernism as a degeneration of artistic engagement with formal and spatial issues such as color, line and shape. Through his collaboration with local artisans and the documentation and exchange of cultural ideas regarding discovery, economy and exploration, Boggio Sella has created a dense body of work that examines not only the origins of the modernist avant-garde but the responsibilities and challenges of making interesting “new” art in a contemporary world where one is so saturated with technological stimuli and imagery that the idea of an original or basic image veers towards the impossible or the exotic.