the river floats in gambling holds
When Scott was telling me about this he sounded so stoked and I am just as much for him, especially after reading the press release and getting the full details of how incredible this is gonna be. If you’re in London I can’t say enough good things about why you should go, seeing these in person is seriously a sight in itself. Amazing. The opening reception is Thursday, October 1st from 7pm to 10pm. DO NOT MISS THIS!!! Full details below…
Lazarides Gallery is pleased to present “Always Almost There” a solo
exhibition of all new works by Scott Campbell.Commemoration is an American pastime. Experiences are for being
photographed, emblazoned onto something: a plate, a keychain, a
t-shirt, a coccyx. Is forgetting that terrible? Not all memories
would seem to be ‘honorable’ anyway. But if we could see these
commemorative artifacts en masse, as a folksy symbological cesspool,
we might be surprised to find it impossible to resist feeling
affectionate. Scott works within that pool. His collages build a
palimpsest of old-reliable iconography much of which is rooted in the
history of tattooing but which, as it’s presented here, reflects less
on tattoos for their own sake and more on the mortal desire to
memorialize and the strange, tid-bit narratives that arise from their
combination. In his words, these are “the stories of blue collar
pirates around nicotine stained unicorns and the price is right fuck
the world of it all.”Scott’s series of dollar bill sculptures make the American-ness
of this literal. The designs are painstakingly drawn in individual
layers that are then laser-cut into 100 one-dollar bills and glued
into a stack. In addition to the clearly subversive implications of
using money-as
medium and the formal echo of the design flourishes printed on the
bills and those carved out of them, this series (like the collages)
appears as a kind of physical manifestation of thousands of histories.
Skin touching paper moving the world on its axis – all of this
cemented
into place like so many victories of what we get to keep.
Scott’s work has been shown at Deitch Projects in New York City,
O.H.W.O.W. In Miami, Illeana Contemporary Art Center in Athens,
Greece, and The Contemporay Museum in Rome, among others.
Opening Reception:
Thursday, October 1st. 7pm to 10pm
On display through October 30th
8 Greek Street,
Soho,
London W1D 4DG
+44 (0) 203 214 0055 / 0066Monday – Friday 11am – 7pm and Saturday 12pm – 5pm.
