In Stephanie Boone’s solo exhibition SANATEE, on view at Basket Books & Art in Houston, visitors are greeted by what appears, at first glance, like a giant, handmade charm bracelet. A large metal chain that hangs diagonally across the gallery is affixed with small objects that dangle from necklaces, ribbons, and fishing lines. Interspersed are shimmering strands of metallic tinsel that sway with a contrasting buoyancy.
Titled Homecoming, the work has a gravitational pull, inviting us into the exhibition. Its linear trajectory and many small mysteries invite a process of discovery, one that mirrors the artist’s practice of collecting through which she amassed these materials. Some of the objects in Homecoming are decades old, gleaned during the artist’s childhood on Texas’ Gulf Coast. Driftwood, quarter-machine toys, costume jewelry, devotional coins, neon fishing floats, hair ties, the topper to a karate trophy; they reflect a distinct sense of materiality and memory of this place, one that is both synthetic and natural, born of both the ocean and oil, distinctly girlish but also gritty.
“Collectors,” Walter Benjamin wrote in 1931, “are people with a tactical instinct.” The collector’s intuitive attraction to objects offers them a playful compulsion to gather, a practice of “profound enchantment” with their materiality and history that liberates things “from the drudgery of usefulness.” Like Benjamin’s collector, Boone gathers the fragments of life, studying their innate qualities and delicately aggregating them into unexpected, alchemical alliances. Necklace clasps, fishing line clips, safety pins, and metallic twist ties delicately tether the items together. Like a charm bracelet, their talismanic power comes, in part, through their linkage.
An intuitive attunement to tactility expands from Homecoming into the broader choreography of the show, where the works unfold as invitations for encounter and investigation.
Homecoming extends toward two doors on the back wall, one of which is a functional portal into the second gallery, and one that is covered in a dense layer of metallic, colorful confetti. This door, titled Tilt Toward Life, has no doorknob or hardware, emphasizing both its simple geometry and its glittering adornment. In blending formal simplicity with materials that border on kitsch, the work echoes Mike Kelley’s notion of “working-class minimalism,” producing an object that confounds the expectations and categorizations of art world austerity. Tilt Toward Life is familiar but also estranged, appearing half-conjured, as if magically transported from a young girl’s daydream.
In the second gallery, Red devotional 2 (Breath of Joy) sets the room’s more haunting tone. The work is an assemblage, featuring a simple wooden shelf — tall, thin, and painted red — atop which rests a bird’s nest. A worn-out oxygen tank sits to one side, bearing the name “JIM” in frayed stickers, and a small plastic Santa Claus sits opposite. The piece seems part gravestone, part altar, and part figurative monument, fashioning together a memorial body out of found parts: wooden ribcages that still hold a vestige of bottled breath and the potential for rebirth.
An interest in bodies and breathing pervades this back gallery, emphasized sensorially through a subtle sonic element that only gradually becomes noticeable. An inconspicuous speaker plays a subtle, droning hum, the sound of a tanbura (a lutelike instrument often crafted out of a gourd). The tanbura’s complex resonance and unvarying rhythm encourages deeper, steadier breathing. Often used as a coregulation device between bodies, the tanbura attunes the visitor’s body to its presence in the space, as well as to the carnal nature of Boone’s work.
Corpse Pose looms nearby, a cluster of dried ocotillo branches, slender and thorny, that dangle from an elevated point, tied together with plastic beads. The descending branches hover as something between aqueous tentacles and skeletal appendages. In some places, they are sutured together with wire, gestures of careful precision. Peering closely, the thorny branches become an apt framing device for a piece that lays on the floor nearby, A Satisfied Mind.
A fake brain lays upon an unassuming pile of mirror shards, swarmed by novelty toy spiders. A Satisfied Mind provides a counterpoint to Corpse Pose, an eerie contrasting of body and mind, the artificial and the natural, a sense of fracturing and the wholeness of breath.
Moments like A Satisfied Mind, which playfully incorporates us into its unsatisfyingly fractured reflections, bring the broad, cosmological questions that float throughout SANATEE back to earth. Dark humor and unexpected absurdities are woven throughout Boone’s deep engagement with the material world. The title of the exhibition comes into focus in this way, a youthful gesture that flips a common and troublesome notion, sanity, into a playful new form, something we might even laugh at.
In the first gallery, near Homecoming’s beginning, a piece titled God Laughs hangs on the wall, a collage of photos and forms of laughter. A group of dolphins laughs in unison nearby an upside-down photo of two young girls caught in a moment of adolescent playfulness. A layer of window tint — a synthetic material seemingly born of Houston — obscures the scenes, as if submerging them in swampy waters. A thorny branch painted muted blue rests atop the frame, and from it descends a chain holding a handmade skeleton, dressed in black, its mouth agape in laughter.
The work’s title stems from a common proverb: we make plans, and God laughs. SANATEE operates much like this proverb, recognizing that if the world’s vibrancy and chaos often supersedes our control, the shared truth of breathing remains. An automatic process that brings the present moment into focus, breathing both sustains life and provides moments of release in laughter. Close viewing of God Laughs reveals our own reflection in the collage’s shiny layers. If, as they say, we make plans and God laughs, Boone asks us to laugh along too.
Stephanie Boone: SANATEE is on view through May 17, 2026, at Basket Books & Art, Houston.
