Exhibitions

ADAM SCOTT: RECORDINGS

mild climate / 507C Hagan St. June 4, 2016 - June 25, 2016

Adam Scott

Painting as recording, recording as painting. Like a mirage, the forms in Adam Scott’s paintings are at once beautiful and eerie, unreal as the visual ramblings of a delirious time traveler. The inherent sci-fi qualities of the work however are only a means to an end, as Scott’s aesthetic aims to undermine the illusion of his imagery. The seamlessness of these schematically depicted images enables the viewer’s expectation to be thwarted: what appears to be modernist abstraction transforms itself into unnamable forms, mutating back and forth between hallucination and reality.

These shamanistic pour paintings expunge the digital imagery once prominent in his work. Like the desert, this foray into dystopian abstraction presents the austerity of abandonment. His paintings are built on their back, constructed like sheets of concrete. Scott embraces the gravity and physical properties of paint-as-material—pure medium of image construction with little intervention.

The totemic paintings are devoid of the picturesque, yet haunt themselves with phantasmic landscapes—form following the fictitious narrative of the all too certain future. Tactile and retinal phenomena pour against his windswept architecture; visions of Astral America sweep across the canvas. Scott time travels back to now, bringing back tiny bits of data: horizontal: speculative: delirious: incarnate: flow. His glowing works are the immortal space paintings found washed up on plastic beaches— ritualized talismans for our mortgaged world.