Downtown, Los Angeles
Saxon Quinn
I Found a Crouton Under a Futon
De BoerDe Boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present new work by Saxon Quinn, the Australia-based artist whose practice threads material experimentation with personal recollection and cultural critique. The exhibition takes its title from a reimagined lyric in the song Uno II by the Viagra Boys—a phrase as absurd as it is intimate: “I found a crouton underneath a futon. Mama said I couldn’t eat it ’cause all my teeth are gone. ” This unlikely poetic fragment unearths a vivid memory for the artist: the blue futon from his family’s home—once a communal site for teenage movies, meals, and dreams. However, beneath the humor and specificity of the lyrics lies a deeper psychic resonance. The seven sculptures in the exhibition are not strictly autobiographical, yet their making became a quiet process of excavation. Memories surfaced—of friends, of uneven upbringings, and of the unspoken disparities that shape how we move through the world. What tools do we inherit—emotionally, culturally, materially—and how do they ready or fail us for adulthood? Each work is meticulously composed, merging ceramic, paint, and found material with a studied, intuitive hand. Faces give way to heads; heads are split, reassembled, glazed, re-glazed—portraits that hover between the personal and the archetypal. The sculptures evoke the fragile intimacy of a party captured in flash photography: fragmented, revealing, emotionally overexposed, and physically worn. Notably, each head rests atop a book or zine—objects from Quinn’s studio and intellectual orbit. These are not merely pedestals, but conceptual scaffolds—supportive presences that shape the body of the work as surely as clay or glaze. Literature becomes structure. Memory becomes method. Raised by his Australian artist mother, Dianne Coulter, in country Victoria, and later immersed in fashion, design and tech that took him to New York City in 2016, Saxon Quinn has honed a visual vocabulary that communicates in the subliminal signs and symbols of global culture and trade. Quinn’s work has been exhibited internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at de boer, Los Angeles: At The Above, Melbourne; Christoffer Eglund, Copenhagen: and Saint Cloche, Sydney; Duo exhibitions include Court Tree Collective, New York: and Garna, Madrid. His work has been included in group exhibitions at IRL, New York; LA Beast, Los Angeles; GR Gallery. New York; Weserhalle, Berlin; Beers, London; and Lio Projects, Toronto, among many others. In 2024, Quinn was awarded a residency at Bandrito in Tuscany, Italy, and his work has been featured in publications including InStyle Magazine, The Art Paper, Monster Children, and Wasted Talent.