Jeremy Scott

Personal Statement

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My practice responds to the dull weight of imperial nostalgia and collective amnesia that overwhelms Eurocentric (White) identities, and continues to effect responses, decisions, and actions of and within society. V.S. Naipaul commented that ‘Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking’: this micro/macro dichotomy is central to my thinking. Working out from ephemeral or cultural products, found objects and fragments of oral history, I offer non-polemical outcomes that unfold space for audience contemplation with no commitment to provide solutions. Experimental process and extensive research direct me towards layered outcomes that are permeated by my notion of the texture of memory and experience.

 

My expanded practice facilitates a varied response, producing outcomes that may be superficially divergent in style and process, but continually return to the source. I often explore the possibilities of non-traditional and found supports, as may seem appropriate to the work, combining acrylic and oil paint with less conventional materials and methods. The demarcation lines that corral art practice within contrived disciplines are boundaries that I will cross if the result is a more resolved outcome. Accident and chance are to be embraced.

 

I am attracted to the storytelling potential of simple articles of clothing – gloves, shirts, neckties – symbolically, particularly, and for the embedded histories entrusted in them. They form an interface between the private and public self, the individual and society. My use of social science research methodologies to interrogate the tension between individual and collective experiences allows scrutiny of how grand narratives interact with individual experience, driving attitudes and expectations.