shapeshifting

‘shapeshifting’ is the first solo exhibition by Austin-based painter Via Boley, and an entirely new body of work.

Working in cut and sanded metal, ink glazes, and thin layers of acrylic, Boley builds each piece toward a single point where something has to give, and something new takes its place. Many of the works sit on reflective metallic surfaces that stand in for a mirror. Look for a clean reflection and you find it broken apart instead: Cubist-inspired forms colliding and warping across the surface, a fractured image in place of a whole one.

This is work about tension and change, and the many states a self can hold at once. “I have been thinking a lot about gaining strength through tension,” Boley says. “To experience tension is to change.” Rather than resolve that instability, the paintings hold it, soft edges and sharp protective spikes, dark passages and bright ones, in the same piece. It is this refusal to settle into one version, one image, one fixed self, that gives the show its name.