my name is scot: Self

Friday, October 16, 2015

New work @ the Vancouver Art Book Fair

Hi All, if you're in Vancouver this weekend, October 17th and 18th, please drop by the Vancouver Art Gallery and check out the amazing assortment of book works, zines and more, including the latest book by yours truly called Where is Here, from the series - Documents of Psychic Amateurs published by the fabulous Perro Verlag
http://www.perroverlag.com/dopa.html .

The series explores psychic phenomena in a variety of intriguing ways and includes works from Bucky Fleur, James MacSwain, Sally Rees, Emily Gooden, Courtney Bourke and James Whitman and Owen Plummer. Here's what the publisher has to say about Where Is Here :

"How is a person a medium, how a conduit, a visionary, a faker? What happens when a ghost enters the room? And who are the ghosts anyway? My Name Is Scot's document, Where is Here, won't provide answers to any of these questions directly but it is, nevertheless, a profoundly focused engagement with, and evocation of the images and voices hovering at the edges of these questions."

I might add that the book discretely touches on notions of people gone missing and the structures and systems that contrive to disappear them. I might also add that some of the source materials for the book were adapted from the Journals of the Society for Psychical Research, a multi volume anthology which used to reside far back in the stacks @ the VPL but which has since 'vanished' during one of the many recent Library makeovers and which, according to current system records, never existed at all...

Please drop by and say hello to the Perro Verlag crew who will be sharing a table with the Western Front on the first floor. For more info on time and location please visit : http://2015.vancouverartbookfair.com

And if you get a chance to look @ Where is Here, I'd love to hear what you think!

Monday, November 19, 2012

Temporary Assignment - New work @ the Richmond Art Gallery

I've just finished installing a new piece called Ingress/Egress @ the Richmond Art Gallery. The exhibition is called Temporary Assignment and it's up from November 19th - 30th, only a short run, but there will be a closing reception on Friday, November 30th from 7-9 PM and you're invited! After 20 years the gallery is re-surfacing their walls, so they've invited 10 artists to create work that goes right onto or in my case, right into the gallery wall. There's some really interesting work in the show, so I hope you get a chance to drop by. Here's the gallery's website for details about getting there: http://www.richmondartgallery.org/

And here's some background on my piece from the official statement:

Ingress/Egress explores notions of affect and agency and the roles that language, technology and architecture play in determining identity and defining the limitations or expectations of body and self.

The two text block tableaus incorporate fragments of found language, including case study data, pop song lyrics, confessional diary entries and social media ‘status’ updates.

Each tableau can be read as an entry point or an exit, a virtual portal to explore or escape the public dialogues, private monologues and ambient textual noises that envelop our bodies and inform or intrude upon our innermost self.

Ingress/Egress by one definition suggests: “The power or liberty of access” in relation to “the act or right of going out”.

By carving and rendering text directly into the wall of the gallery, Ingress/Egress hopes to lead the viewer into a consideration of the spatial, textual and virtual constructions that support our public meanings and institutions and perhaps, suggest a way to carve out our own version of self from the wall of information that increasingly defines our media saturated lives.

So much for strategy, in reality, 20 years of repeated painting made the gallery walls incredibly hard and very resistant to being intruded upon.

Knuckles bloodied and arm muscles cramping, I persevered and adapted and some unanticipated surface applications developed alongside the more successful incursions below the surface and while my tactics for tackling the wall were severely challenged, in the end, my intentions were perhaps even better served and I'm pretty happy with how the piece turned out.