DRIFT TIME

Artist Statement

In David Booth’s Drift Time we travel through an indeterminate space; a series of memories, premonitions and alternate worlds. Our guiding protagonists are a representation of Booth himself under various guises, and with them they have brought relics of the artists personal effects.

Booth has been an avid collector for much of life. Books, artwork, toys, music, plants and ephemera envelop him in both home and studio. As he works he streams podcasts, documentaries and interviews, audiobooks and lectures. In recent times the ideologies of renowned visionary Patti Smith have struck a chord. Smith advocates for more ‘daydream time’ as a crucial means to entice creative impulse, new ideas, problem solving and self awareness, and so too does Booth.

As is the case with all of his work, Drift Time acts a receptacle of his most treasured items and surrounds, replicated and reinterpreted. Amongst the paintings, carvings and ceramics we see pop culture icons, Astro Boy and Star Wars figurines; artworks by Sol LeWitt, Ellsworth Kelly and Theo van Doesburg; references to Japanese musicians in Yellow Magic Orchestra and Akiko Yano. Housed upon and within a single structure that draws its cues from a traditional Japanese Byōbu, Booth’s work spans the gallery floor in concertina form. Yet rather than serve as divider of the space, it invites us to circle the room, continually looking inwards.

In this way we can approach this series of work as a walk through of Booth’s mind, traversing fiction and fantasy, the past and the future, the material and the immaterial. Most importantly though we are invited, as Smith suggests, to ‘escape our own reality’ and dream along with Booth, relishing in the familiarities found within the works whilst allowing our thoughts to drift between that which is real and that which is not… yet.