Samara Scott's works are neither image nor objects, neither figurative nor abstract. They are recognizable things arranged in an unfamiliar order floating in a foreign substance. To gaze into them, whichever their aspect, is to be caught by someone else’s attention to strange things bought cheaply and hastily to feed, clean, satisfy and service human bodies. Rosalind Krauss wrote retrospectively about Rauschenberg’s combines as ‘a refus-al to use the autographic mark of conventional drawing [...in] his insistence that [it is] the stuff of lived experience – the things one bumps into as one moves through the world – that forms experience.’ Unlike Rauschenberg’s consumables, Scott’s assemblages reveal how otherworldly ours have become. Each one has a different hue, brighter, bolder, less natural, more lurid than the last. Attention grabbing bits and pieces plucked from supermarket isles, undressed from their packaging and interned in neon groupings pique our attention. The process of consumerism is de-layed, as the odious stuff of swift consumption is made opulent and extraordinary.
All attention is a commodity now, economists tell us, bought and sold in strange new ways. Its supply is constant because we are always paying attention to something. Tim Wu notes, ‘If we think of attention as a currency, we must allow that it is always, necessarily, being “spent”. There is no saving for it later....’ Attention grabbing the business of catching us during the ‘in-between’ moments of the day, as Wu phrases it. Scott insists that her work is not a critique of capital, but it is a glut of cheap consumables, grabby, bright, sparkling stuff, penetrating, penetrable, fertile, fetid, distilled and suspended, co-opting Wu’s ‘in-between moments’ as a time and space for reflection (in spite of the smell). Her work has a future evolving from its precedents, in the dual histories of porous, fluid pictures and sculptures on the brink of an image.
- Excerpt from Assembled Junk and Primal Spunk: Silks by Isobel Harbison published by Mousse & Eastside Projects
Samara Scott (b.1985 London, lives and works in Dover) has exhibited widely and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include: Discordia, KM21, The Hague, Netherlands 2023; Purple Rains, DauLang Gallery, Seoul, South Korea 2023; BRIM, The Sunday Painter, London, UK 2021; The Doldrums, CAPC Museum, Bordeaux, France 2020; Belt and Road, Tramway, Glasgow, UK 2018; Jacobs Creek, The Sunday Painter, Offsite / Four Six One Nine, Los Angeles, USA 2016; Developer, Pumphouse & Battersea Park, London, UK 2016; Still Life, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, UK 2015; Silks, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK 2015; Aquarelle Gastebutch, Ermes at Granpalazzo Rome, Italy 2015. Selected group exhibitions include: Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum Triennial, New York, USA (2021); Mixing it Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2021); Days are Dogs, Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France, FR (2017); Entangled, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2017).