seehere.info Co_creation a la LYNDSEY SCOTTseehere@seehere.info
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“Artists Emerging on the National Scene” Show @ Artist Guild
Top: Burrowing a Wormhole in the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil (2006) / Acrylic and oil on wood panel
Bottom: Rend (2006) / Acrylic on wood panel
AckNOWledge Mural
The Acknowledge Wall / Temporary interactive mural installation on Cherokee Street (Cinco de Mayo 2006)
It was a strange and wonderful spring. I was learning to feel and discern the distinctions between intuition, vision, and paranoia. I would go sit in the rubble of the Empire Sandwich Shop that had fallen and sing songs. I salvaged a stool from the wreckage. I was inspired to make a project that reflected all the peoples and shops I saw that called the street home, according to the caricatures that we communicate ourselves by. I got a bunch of foam and bought paint and walked around a whole bunch. I ate a lot of El Chico gingerbread pigs. It was very learn-by-doing. I don’t think I had ever heard the word alderman before that.
Here’s one version of the tale: <RFT>.
Or, here it is in grantspeak: “In order to highlight the benefit of public art in an economically depressed and crime-ridden neighborhood, artist Lyndsey Scott pioneered and paid for an inclusive and interactive, temporary, site-specific community project during the Hispanic Business Association’s Cinco de Mayo festival. Groundwork was laid by open conversations with the street’s business owners who chose a ‘mascot’ from their store. These characters were blown up and transferred to foam cutouts and painted by neighborhood residents during the festival. They were then pasted to the raw wall from a recently, politically motivated demolition of the historic “Empire Sandwich Shop”. The resultant characters formed a hodgepodge family portrait that acted as the key to a visual treasure hunt of neighborhood icons.”
The whole weekend was lovely – great weather, they had just put hay down on the lot. I ended up getting liability insurance via the LRA through a guy there who went to church where I’d just finished the Living Tree. They were amused that I brought the foam cut-out of the Indian to the LRA on a fieldtrip. I’d called Shirley up to ask her how to do the installation legitimately and she told me I’d need million dollar liability insurance…. i think maybe to throw a kink in the plans but it just made it a time-oriented challenge that was fun to Check off the list. Shannon Knox rocked the painting hard, we had fun! And Sarah P came out and painted gorgeous portraits of the kids.
My favorite moment maybe was the way the wall got named. Ms. Monica who I didn’t know then came by and offered to help, and was interestd in the hot wire we were using to cut the foam. She wanted to make the words ACKNOWLEDGE HIM for her house — and ended up giving the title to the wall. That was the start of our friendship, I see her and her daughter and grandbabies all the time and her smile always makes my day brighter.
Alternative currency
Sisyphus dollars (2006) / Acrylic on industrial cardboard leftovers
Would
Collaborative show with Wesley Fordyce at The Old Urbis Orbis, April 2006
Move
Godbits over the Soufside
Godbits Over the Soufide: Collaborative show with Bob Reuter at the Third Floor Gallery St. Louis, Missouri (2004)
Vacancy
Moat/Mote
Home is the Backside of a Mirror
P.S. Archpocalypse (Creation Myth in the Making)
All works: 4′X4′ Collage, acrylic, and oil on panel
From the catalogue: I like the conversation that art starts. I like the art that conversation starts too. This back and forth between Bob and I started blind like online dating but instead of a computer there was a south side gutter and instead of a chat room there was a tire-tracked black bound sketchbook with no name on it. Months later during a Palookaville intermission, I traced the lost book I’d found back to him when he showed me through some subsequent volumes — I immediately recognized the familiar and uniquely right-on offness of his specifically St. Louis cast of characters. From that grew conversations about Scripts and Stories and how cities get built, and from that grew our mythic tribute to the plight of rebel angels everywhere, faithfully trailing tired wings like scolded puppy tails or punctured kites — God bits over the south side. God bits, like glitter, snow, tickertape parades — Fuzz in beloved belly buttons or confetti in envelopes; hair in soap and coins in pockets, Tokens Afloat — still a-traveling down down like ash from a Very Far Away Volcano, or our Lard the cosmic chain-smoker sending scurrilously sacred reminders that we’re each just a piece. I usually start a painting by digging around in an old story and watching how its plot still squirms around today, in sound bites and media cips and juicy detritus we step in and over. I wish it were more practical, but for me paint is convenient goo to semi-permanently fix a question so you can think about it for longer than a second. The intimacy of the visual world teaches me all the time to pay and play attention. What happens if we go back to when we could see the shape of things? Can a picture become a common text? We share an experience by looking at the same thing and a place for dialogue grows in the space between our individual interpretations and experiences. -Lyndsey Scott, November 2004Icarus/Icaro
Icarus/Icaro I,II,III,IV
For Venus Envy, St. Louis, Missouri (2004)
All works: Oil on panel 3′X3′
Lead/Follow
For the RAC CAT show ” ” (2003)
Lead (after Brueghel’s
Follow (after Brueghel’s
Spread
SPREAD / Painting Show at Messhugah, St. Louis, Missouri (2003)
Virus / After Coreggio’s Jupiter & Io
Fingers / After De Ribera’s Jacob Deceives Isaac
Legs/ After Courbet’s Origin of the World
Fire / After Froment’s Burning Bush
Rumor / After Durer’s Joseph in Egypt
Panic/ After Bosch’s Extraction of the Stone of Madness
Terror/ After Reni’s Massacre of Innocents
All works: Oil on panel, 2′X2′
From the catalogue:
Spread is a seam that leaks. Pores, edges. Can’t put my finger on, can’t fit my hand around; enlarge, extend, disperse. Spread is mouthful liquid dribbles down chin and stray wisp spoke that fans then dances corkscrew caught by light. Broadcast, expand, diverge, feast, publish, sweep. Spread out. Unleash, unfurl, add fuel to – nothing stays where it is. Stretch, thrust, sprout, gather, wax, mount, swell. Spread: the word ate at me and was embodied in the branches I live with, in the woods on the bluff, arm-wide branches that reach to the sky at dusk just before their bark is too shadowed in black to see. I wait for that moment and paint then. Twilight reduces forms to flickering: see spirit instead of shell. Disseminate. Scatter. Steal.
In time, the word found home in bits of art history that became laden with links to current news. Past and present plots entwine, personal and public narratives merge. Spread fingers legs, spread rumor-panic-virus-terror. Spread fire, then—Phoenix? Hell? Ever same news, new headlines: tendency toward decay. I find images by impulse—not systematically but motley menagerie. I draw hodgepodge-style from Romantic or Medieval or Renaissance periods: eenie meenie miney. Then drag old masterwords into an arena where symbols become gimmicks and sentiment is recycled. Skim off only the most superficial (universal?) storyline and boil down to essence. Pandemic fear, pleasure, fate, pretense, possibility, oppression, propaganda. Prozac. Always the specifics change but the spirit remains. We pick what to see through rose colored glass.
Paint for me is fungus and acid. It vacuum-packs the moment past and then plunges it into the present as an unwitting victim of erosion that both obscures and reveals the moment’s face. At once irrevert and sincere, the gumball palette and modern-object/collaged interruptions jar an ability to locate the image in a history that won’t stand still.
I always hope to create an image that unravels more than it explains. Can a picture become a common text? We share an experience by looking at the same thing and a place for dialogue grows in the space between our individual interpretations and experiences.
-Lyndsey Scott, 4/2003
Retablos
Retablos (I-X)
Oil on metal (2002)
Borrowed Means
Borrowed Means: Senior Thesis Show @ The University of Illinois, BFA Painting (2002)
Evetree(after Adam and Eve)
Topple (after Brueghel’s Tower of Babel)
Belief (after Caraveggio’s Thomas)
FaceOff (after Giotto’s Judas)
The Wanderers (after Goya’s The Flagellants)
The Wanderer Map