The Sunday Painter is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with London-based artist Samara Scott in the gallery’s offsite project space at Four Six One Nine in Mid-City, Los Angeles.
These new body of liquid works, Marshes, (all 2016) are fantasy data farms of our stuttering western environments. In these moist, laminated, drifting landscapes you might read the churning superimpositions of mutating and accelerating media landscapes, the oddness of reality and the mercurial hysteria of our time.
The artist spent a period of time in the city, driving round aimlessly, anonymously, gathering and harvesting discarded materials from the city’s streets and scrap yards. All the objects contain a garbled nostalgia; Jump leads, Halloween decorations, rotting fruit, belts and ties, fridge grills, venetian blinds, air conditioning vents, cigarette butts and potatoes mingle and swarm with decorative gravel and plant life pillaged from Hollywood lawns.
Scott acts almost parasitically to the city, but allows the city to pollute the work in turn; often working with processes she describes as digestive; ingesting elements from her surroundings and masticating them in an almost ‘bulimic’ spasm. Her processes involve impatience, greed, congestion and finally regurgitation. Emerging from a site of cerebral bloated inflammation, these gastric veneers seem to melt and sear simultaneously; as ice cubes singeing out bbq coals.
Under the relentless LA sun, the crudely pasted up sticky-sickly window vinyl repeats the gestures of levity and suppression, making the space feel like a disused shopping mall or boarded up furniture warehouse. Inside, ghosting with a sheen suffocation and rupture these gelatinous cosmic reliefs are too like reflective shop windows or the lubed flushness of an iPad screen; but oozing, sweating and composting. The objects wait under their coatings in their condos of hollow mattresses (so alike aroused unmade beds) with slow infection like condensation in a body bag.
There is a feverish cleaving tension in these sprawling deposits of matter. In the sockets dents and protrusions the narcissistic accretions are banked; gridlocked and glistening under sheaths of packaging plastics and dustsheets. An iridescent airbrush effect smothers the lip-glossed undergrowth with intimacy and contamination. Examining both digital and chemical realities they are like sodden swatches of infected molecular bacteria; hallucinatory suspensions that are both sour and glossy, enticing and repellent.
