Michelangelo’s Place is a Carrara marble bench referencing the scale of the original benches that surround Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence, Italy. The piazza, built in 1869 as part of Florence’s urban renewal plan (initiated by the rise of an emerging middle class), is dedicated to Michelangelo and includes copies, cast in bronze, of his famous works. Bool archived and then carved selections of the graffiti found on the benches in Piazzale Michelangelo in order to examine how defacement can both subvert and uphold art history.

Produced in Florence the video, Forensics for a Mamluk, is where Bool exercises another mode of abstraction; this time the subject is one of the rarest and most valuable carpets in the world. The giant Egyptian Mamluk carpet (from the first half of the 16th century) was forgotten among stored items of the Palazzo Pitti until it was rediscovered in a sealed chamber at the palazzo by Alberto Boralevi, a Florentine carpet expert, in 1982. The video is comprised of segments showing extreme close ups, adjustments of the carpet’s RGB colour palette, and larger pan views of the carpet’s motif and texture. Like Michelangelo’s Place the video is concerned with the complexity of how we (the viewer) experience the overload of the Renaissance in Florence (i.e. the Stendhal syndrome) and the information that exists within material sources that are outside the obvious canon of art.