Take an audio tour of a 2022-23 exhibition at The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum! Listen to artist Lee Boot chat about his show "Lee Boot: Abstracts & Artifacts," on view at The Peale from November 2022-January 2023. You can see videos and interact with more media files using Smartify, the ultimate cultural travel app! Includes 21 narrated stops.

Lee Boot (00:00): So you are looking at little paper cards on a red velvet fabric that is under a bell jar. These cards are symbols, uh, they're metaphors, symbols, drawings of metaphors that I drew after I did the painting that's on the left. Because the metaphors that I was going to use to talk to teenagers about their brains and the euphoria project were beginning to really take shape at this point. I knew what the metaphors would be, but I didn't know how to connect them in a script yet, in a, in a script for what we had decided would be a feature film. And again, you'll be able to see like 20 minutes of clips from that feature film on, uh, the first of the, of the five monitors in the center of the room going, going count, going clockwise. The first one of those will, will show you some of the film, these cards.

(01:00): I would, you know, put them in stacks stick them in my pocket. I would go to a cafe, or I'd go somewhere for lunch or a bar, maybe I would spread them out on a table and just look at them and try to figure out how could I connect this image of a pilgrim's hat, which is so connected to American's story about ourselves with an image of an angel or of a fast car and so on. And, and it just helped me make the connections that would ultimately lead to a script. And the script that I was able to write after doing this work really did take a different approach to talking to young people about ideas that might help them avoid addiction and dangerous substance misuse. And the idea ended up being fairly simple. Really. It was just to say, look, don't be ashamed of wanting to feel good.

(02:00): Everybody wants to feel good, so let's get the shame out of the picture. The biggest question once you get over that threshold is, well, what works to feel good? And the thing about taking a lot of illegal drugs is it, it doesn't really work. It works less and less well over time. And it, and, and it doesn't sustain, you know, it's just one second you're high, and the next minute you kind of feel awful, you know, whereas what we were saying is, the long term pursuit of doing what is meaningful to you, what you feel good about and something that is engaging for you, is a much more reliable way to pursue happiness in America where that's so important in the long term. So all that crazy process that we did in the first few pieces that I painted and took those metaphor cards around and all that, and all that really did lead to a different way of approaching this than was being done at the time.

(03:08): And in the study that was done as part of the grant, we learned that students really did get that idea and that the way we told the film, which was using these metaphors, did get them talking and their ideas changed over time. And that's the great thing about using Metaphor is that people have to reflect and maybe talk about it with each other. It doesn't just go in like some simple clear message, you know, you really have to kind of work with it. So that's the result of the Euphoria project right there.