Boz Deseo Garden at Timeshare

Boz Deseo Garden, The Virtual Estate of Roy Hoffman (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Timeshare. Photo: Brandon Bandy.

When I walk into Boz Deseo Garden’s exhibition, The Virtual Estate of Roy Hoffman at Timeshare, I am immediately greeted by an oversized wooden table. On top of it sits Dolmancé (all works 2024), a Duplo DF-520N Automatic Paper Folding Machine holding various texts, including the press release, checklist, map, and an excerpt from Philosophy in the Bedroom by Marquis De Sade (1795). I look around the room to find a travel lamp hung on the wall, facing downwards and casting a halo of light just beneath it (Madame De Saint Ange). Other objects dot the walls, including a metal shelf with six empty compartments and a bronze inkwell—within the small space, they can all be viewed at once. I walk around the gallery confused by the collection of mundane objects that Garden purchased on Facebook Marketplace from Roy Hoffman, the alias of a Calabasas resident and investor in African cannabis.

The one item not acquired by Garden from Hoffman’s estate sale was a slave chain. Included in the checklist and entitled The Whisper, the chain was passed down to Hoffman through his family, descendants of slaves who survived the Haitian Revolution. Although absent, it haunts the room, transforming the otherwise ordinary objects into an ethnographic archive of slavery’s less visible legacy. Suddenly, it feels more important that the sterile, empty metal shelf on the wall belonged in a laboratory freezer (Augustin). The freezer shelf begins to telegraph the ghosts of scientific racism, including the countless medical experiments on Black people and the non-consensual harvesting of their body parts. The carved bronze inkwell becomes haunted as well, drawing the viewer back in time via an aesthetic most dominant in colonial furnishing (Eugenie). For Garden, the slave chain is a historical artifact that has become sensationalized as a symbol of a time that many believe is firmly in the past. Without access to the chain, we are forced to consider the continued presence of anti-Blackness in our everyday lives. The ordinariness of these objects speaks to the mundanity of the slave chain, something that was at one point another utilitarian object. Given this relation, anti-Blackness can best be understood as something implicated in the most mundane and ubiquitous features of our daily lives.

It is important to note that The Whisper is listed as “unavailable” on the checklist. The word choice is telling, considering Hoffman offered to loan the chain to Garden for the exhibition. Originally, Hoffman listed it for sale at $20,000, noting that it was intended for museum acquisition only. While it may seem like displaying The Whisper in a museum or exhibition would bring the viewer closer to understanding slavery, Garden’s choice to omit it challenges the fantasies of visibility and display. To display the slave chain in this way is dishonest—it presents the history of anti-Blackness as an isolated thing of the past rather than as a shifting force continuing to shape our present. By declining to exhibit the slave chain as a work of art or a historical artifact, Garden is not only refusing fetishization: They are also depicting how, whether seen or unseen, the logic of anti-Black slavery haunts even the most unthought-of objects. Like the slave chain missing from the gallery, the legacy of anti-Blackness doesn’t need to be materially hypervisible in space, it only needs to be a whisper.

Boz Deseo Garden: The Virtual Estate of Roy Hoffman runs from February 17–March 16, 2024 at Timeshare (3526 N. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90031).

Boz Deseo Garden, Augustin (2024). Laboratory-grade storage shelf, 18.25 x 10 x 6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Timeshare. Photo: Brandon Bandy.

Boz Deseo Garden, The Virtual Estate of Roy Hoffman (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Timeshare. Photo: Brandon Bandy.

Boz Deseo Garden, Dolmancé (detail) (2024). Automatic paper folding machine, 38 x 19 x 21 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Timeshare. Photo: Brandon Bandy.

Boz Deseo Garden, The Virtual Estate of Roy Hoffman (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Timeshare. Photo: Brandon Bandy.

Boz Deseo Garden, Madame De Saint Ange (installation view) (2024). Compact travel lamp, 3.5 x 3.5 x 7 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Timeshare. Photo: Brandon Bandy.

Boz Deseo Garden, Madame De Saint Ange (detail) (2024). Compact travel lamp, 3.5 x 3.5 x 7 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Timeshare. Photo: Brandon Bandy.

Boz Deseo Garden, Le Chevalier (2024). 1992 Bird Watcher’s Digest, 5 x 7 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Timeshare. Photo: Brandon Bandy.

Boz Deseo Garden, Eugenie (2024). Engraved antique bronze inkwell, 8 x 4.75 x 0.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Timeshare. Photo: Brandon Bandy.

Shani Strand is a Los Angeles-based artist. They hold an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. They have been published in The Avery Review and Pin-Up Magazine.

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