Our comforts are so destructive, my complicity, our complicity, art's complicity. But it’s so hard to look at everything all the time. We are all in the same camp, the same landscape. However you draw your freedoms, they are dependent on the unfreedom of others. Its brutality, the burning burden of dreams the contradictions everywhere the averted eyes. The horror to the realisation that when I consume, I deplete my surroundings. I guess I think a lot about freedom - the paradox of it. That we are killing the world - through a kind of mass malfunctioning consumption. Whats on your mind right now? Human appetites. Samara Scott, The Glades, 2019 (detail), Plexiglas, water, corn oil, pigments, nylon stockings, plastics, ice-cube bags, shampoo, leg wax, hair gel, foil, and sponges, 27 1/2 x 70 7/8 x 2 in. Another way of describing it also could be to say it's weather like some days it rains, sometimes it's fog, sometimes an evaporation, sometimes allergic, sometimes lukewarm.
![compositions furniture compositions furniture](https://img-new.cgtrader.com/items/2472509/1046449961/furniture-composition-20-3d-model-max-obj-fbx.jpg)
An element of something confessional, but it’s more reflexive than that, more bodily, like a rash, a moan, a cough, a puke. How do you get this stuff out? Sometimes it’s quite a corporal reaction, the contagion of it. I've been reading the old Frankenstein again - and thinking of that creature that is decay collaged back to life - an animated ruin of sad and sweet flavors, the celebration, the lament, the collisions, the clashings.
![compositions furniture compositions furniture](https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/349e2a87253155.5dbbc9d1b111a.jpg)
I want to make work that inhabits both the gleam and the gloom. I’m a bit of a scavenger of the past, archiving our own residue, smears and alchemic monsters really. I am a stirrer, interferer of puke, the ghosts in the things we make. I try to interfere with the gravity of things, their normal location but also the POVs - upturn and twisting orientation.
#COMPOSITIONS FURNITURE FULL#
I make soups, broths, viscous compositions, full of drowned things, traces and remnants, tracks and streaks left behind. I work with liquidity, spillage, regurgitations, glitches. How would you describe what you do? I'm a collagist. Picture credit: © and courtesy the artist and The Sunday Painter. Samara Scott, installation view: The Doldrums, CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux France, 2020. When you've read the story take a look at Scott’s artist page on Artspace and check out her Artspace edition from earlier this year, Gargoyle, 2021. We asked her a few questions about her life and art.
![compositions furniture compositions furniture](https://images2.imgix.net/p4dbimg/1284/images/c060-419-031-a.jpg)
Scott, one of the break out stars of the recent New Museum Triennial show, is one of over a hundred contemporary artists to be featured in Prime: Art's Next Generation, Phaidon's new survey of promising contemporary artists. Occupying the same compressed space, the body is not separate from the material landscape in which it exists." - Madeline Weisburg. In the 2020 digital work Poster series, Scott’s own backside is pressed against a scanner bed scattered with bits of trash, including sharp toothpicks, earring hooks, and chips of glass. Seen together, Scott’s distinctive assemblages forge a type of postindustrial consumerist landscape, but, while located broadly in the world of consumer goods, consumption as seen in Scott’s work denotes something bodily too in a 2016 interview with Document, she called her compositions a “bulimic regurgitation” or “a mastication” of things. As in many examples from Scott’s oeuvre, in this work, components maintain a decipherable form even so, when seen flattened and entangled in a landscape of things, they transform into strange, sickly substances, seemingly biological, manufactured, and virtual all at once. In the case of her bold 2019 work The Glades, water, corn oil, pigments, nylon stockings, plastics, ice-cube bags, shampoo, leg wax, hair gel, foil, and sponges are poured into a rectangular Plexiglass case, appearing as an ultramarine liquid composition of natural and artificial material excess. "In her sculptures and site-specific installations, foraged trash and supermarket-shelf miscellany come together in spontaneous petri dish–like tableaux, sometimes shown pooled in iridescent outdoor fountains, cut into the floors of galleries, stuck on gleaming glass windows, or stretched into vast suspended ceilings. Samara Scott is known for her inventive use of materials-ranging from nail polish, lettuce, fabric softener, avocado skins, and cigarette ash to toothpaste, soda, toilet paper, noodles, and eye shadow-employing them in ways that emphasize their aesthetic qualities and chemical properties, writes Madeline Weisburg i n Phaidon’s new book Prime: Art’s Next Generation.