William Scott
White Columns, New York, USA
William Scott is one of a number of artists to emerge Oakland’s Creative Growth Center, an institution in California mentoring artists with mental and physical disabilities. Over the past four years, White Columns has brought several these artists into direct dialogue with the contemporary art world; notably, it has done so without any direct emphasis on their outsider status. The result has been a series of intriguing, impressive, and inevitably thought-provoking exhibitions. In that this work can initially appear to be excessively knowing or naïve, the exhibitions question the role of authorial intention and contextual knowledge in the production of art. But, above all, the series has presented a range of forcefully idiosyncratic work that stages a complex matrix of socially inscribed ideas.
Scott’s paintings are infused with sci-fi paranoia and psychic claustrophobia; his figures are often hunched and squeezed into the frame. Touching on everything from education and religion to race and family, the key theme running through this work is the basic relationship between the individual and society.
Scott’s highly stylized portraits of Black America include a series of mask-like faces painted on foamcore, and a selection of these, along with an outsized papier-mâché head, form the first part of the exhibition. Other works freely absorb the language of black church groups, high-school yearbooks, alien invasions and citizenship. These disparate fragments tessellate to form a mosaic representing race and identity in America, and a deep sense of interlocking social worlds.
One of the central pillars of Scott’s creative world is a highly politicized vision for a new San Francisco, which comprises razing the city and rebuilding it for a utopian future. Real-world politics is always present in Scott’s work, but presented without the distance of irony or theoretical speculation; for Scott, they are real proposals rather than conceptual propositions.
Scott is preoccupied with figures of authority and his own role within various structures of social order, and it is this more personal work that is featured in this exhibition (his drawings for the San Francisco urban planning project were included in his 2006 White Columns show). That is apparent in his portraits of figures from the worlds of church, the police and the school, characters that are both real and imagined, and which often share the frame with figures representing Scott himself.
Scott’s work is wrapped up in the idea of what it means to be a citizen, to be interpellated within the social order. That is probably most memorably captured in an untitled series of sci-fi infused works from 2006. These are populated with a lovely switch and change of language - ‘citi-fi’ and ‘inner limits’ and ‘whole some citizen’ - and a series of wide-eyed future citizens of the world, about to depart on airport shuttles into space.
In the most direct way, Scott communicates the way in which being part of any social order relates to pop cultural paranoia and conspiracy theories. But he also captures the deeper suspicion that we are sometimes possessed by forces beyond our comprehension. This speaks to a universal experience that has nothing to do with the categories of disability or social marginalization.
Katie Kitamura
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