Lonely Planet II, 2015
6 x 285 x 350 cm
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 refusal 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 delayed, as the odious stuff of swift consumption is made opulent and extraordinary.
Samara Scott (b.1985 UK) Selected exhibitions include Belt and Road, Tramway, Glasgow, UK; Voyage, Curated by Alexandre da Cunha, Bergamin & Gomide, Sao Paulo, BR, 2017 (group); Days are Dogs, Palais De Tokyo, Paris, FR, 2017 (group); Entangled, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, 2017 (group); Developer, Pumphouse Gallery & Battersea Park, London, UK, 2016 (solo), Jacobs Creek, The Sunday Painter, Off-site, Los Angeles, US, 2016 (solo); Silks, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, 2015 (solo); Still Life, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, SCT, 2015 (solo); High Street, Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK, 2014 (solo). Samara is represented in London by The Sunday Painter.
