CAR

Car collects the automotive imagery Will Boone used as raw material for his paintings and sculpture, turning a working scrapbook into a stand-alone artist's book.

Published by Karma in 2016 in an edition of 700, the book reproduces found photographs, advertisements, and clippings of cars that Boone gathered for research, arranged without captions or sequence so the imagery reads as visual notation rather than narrative. It closes with an original piece of writing by novelist Harry Crews, whose fiction shares Boone's interest in Southern working-class culture. The book is a 40-page softcover measuring roughly 10½ × 8½ inches.

Boone treats found material, including car parts, gates, and carnival imagery, as the starting point for paintings and sculpture that read as assemblages of American vernacular culture. Car followed Prison Rodeo and Elvis, earlier Karma publications built from the same kind of research archive, and preceded Pope.L, Will Boone, a 2016 two-artist exhibition catalog.