Kind of Like the Mayor of the Underground Art World
Show up for a show’s opening at Boston’s Distillery Gallery and you may see lining the walls -- after you walk through the enormous, rusty gate, over the black steel catwalk into the main gallery -- anything from the grotesque, decaying ecosystems of Corey Corcoran’s paintings to the melting, multi-colored cityscapes of Adam O’Day’s work. You are likely to find crowds of people arrayed across that catwalk, on the leather couch, and throughout the room, checking out the art on display and drinking cheap beer. And you are almost guaranteed to find Scott Chasse, Community Arts Coordinator for the Distillery, which was once bestowed with the somewhat dubious honor, “Best Use of a Basement in South Boston” by the Boston Phoenix. He will be browsing the work and taking the time to catch up with the Distillery’s artists, whom he usually only sees once a month or so. Scott is 37, but if he has shaved recently, you will be forgiven for thinking he is 25.
The thing about Scott is that his title means something to him. Not in the sense that having a title sets him apart from other people (as Adam O’Day, a Distillery tenant says, “[Scott] has a real blue collar view of the arts. He never looks down his nose at people or their artwork.”), but in the sense that, to him, the community is an extremely important part of the art world, and may even be the point of "the whole art thing."
“Being a part of the arts community is a great way to get inspired,” Scott says, “and to gauge your own successes and failures.”
Part of this love of community may stem from the fact that Scott never went to art school.
By not studying art, he says, “I lacked the experience of being around a group of other artists as colleagues.”
Though urged by an art teacher to pursue an art degree after finishing high school in 1992, Scott instead got by working part time jobs so that he could spend the rest of his time playing music.
“I used to be afraid to admit that I didn’t go to art school,” Scott said one morning while setting up for the opening of the gallery’s latest show, “but now I kind of… I wouldn’t say that I embrace it, but I’m not afraid of it anymore either.”
Much of the work he did after high school was skilled manual labor working for the owner of a Cinema Pub in his home town of Amesbury, Mass.
“Each day was different,” Scott says. “Some days I’d be disassembling a toilet, tiling a floor, or repairing drywall; other days I’d be splicing together 35mm motion picture reels for that night’s movie at the Cinema Pub.”
In 1995, at age 20, Scott moved to Haverhill, Mass. There he opened a coffee house with a partner his own age. They used the space to host events, like performances by local bands and poetry readings.
“It was a popular venue while it lasted,” Scott says, “which was up until 1999.”
The business was never profitable, though, so after it closed, Scott went back to working odd jobs in Amesbury for a couple of years. This lasted, as Scott says, “until I got my act back together and moved to Boston for school in 2001.”
Instead of studying art when he got to Boston, as he had been prodded to do so many years ago, he studied audio production at a school which was then called Massachusetts Communications College, but has since been bought out by the Art Institute and changed its name to the New England Institute of Art and Design.
In lieu of a formal art history education, Scott has turned to his friends and fellow artists.
“I always absorb a lot from people who did go to school,” Scott says. “I try to listen as much as possible.”
This has worked out for him so far. Scott does not know everything there is to know about his creative ancestors, and he is not the type to spend a whole day walking through a museum, taking in the works of the masters (“I get art fatigue.”), but he knows how to paint, and he knows how to set up a show, and he knows how to enjoy doing it.
“It’s clear to me that he makes his own work purely for his own enjoyment,” Adam says. “It just so happens that everyone else loves it, too.”
This culture of mutually-affirming artists is the one thing that Scott may have benefited from had he gone to art school, but he has finally found it at the Distillery. More than just a gallery, the building has studios and apartments for more than 100 artists on its upper floors.
“When I moved to the Distillery,” Scott says, “it was the first time that I was around a large group of artists at different levels of their careers, but all existing as equal at the same time.”
He first encountered the Distillery in 2002, the year after he moved to Boston from Amesbury. When he first came to Boston, he lived in Mission Hill for a short time. His roommate there had a friend at the Distillery who was moving out (“We had an in.”), and Scott and his roommate took the space over.
“I knew as soon as we got to the building to take a look that it was the type of place I would love to be a part of,” Scott says.
As luck would have it, at the same time that Scott was moving into the Distillery, the building was undergoing major renovations, and Scott, just starting out at school, was hired as a laborer. As the gallery’s management grew more familiar with Scott, he was given more projects until he was offered his current position in 2007.
His current work has moved from the realm of physical labor into more of a planning role. He is responsible for curating shows in the Distillery’s main gallery, and for organizing the Distillery’s part in South Boston Open Studios.
The gallery, with its catwalks, its leather couch, its white pillars taking up parts of the space, can feel somewhat cluttered. But when people start showing up to see the work, it almost forces them to interact. The current exhibit, by Distillery tenant Vanessa Irzyk, is a collection of abstract multi-media works, whose bright colors and wild forms clash with the black and white austerity of the gallery, leaping from the walls it seems.
“We switch out the shows every six weeks or so,” Scott says, “so we’re constantly looking for what we’re going to have next. Or even if we have three shows lined up, we’re looking for a fourth.”
South Boston Open Studios takes place twice per year, once in the spring and once in the fall. It involves opening up the Distillery’s studios and those of the smaller King Terminal down the street, for two days of gallery exhibits with most artists present.
His typical day requires him to spend time in front of his computer, answering e-mails, updating the Distillery’s Web site, dealing with social media. This is all in service of the artists in residence there, making sure that their work has a chance to see the light of day.
“If it weren’t for dudes like him,” Adam says, “lazy artists like myself wouldn’t have a chance to show or get involved as much.”
There are currently 68 units at the Distillery. Of those, 30 serve as both home and studio for their occupants. The rest are studios only, which are rented out for artists who have a place to live, but need a place to work. Usually, though, more than one tenant occupies a space, which means that all told Scott is responsible for meeting the needs of around 140 artists.
His work, done as it is mostly on his computer, does not require him to be at the Distillery more than once per month, which has allowed him to make his recent move to Brooklyn.
“My girlfriend got a great postdoc position in New York City,” Scott says, “so she moved there full time and I was kind of bouncing between New York and Boston for a couple of years. Last year was actually the first time I didn’t renew a lease in Boston.”
Scott, however, does not let the Distillery grow too distant, even when he is away for weeks at a time. He says he checks in as often as he can, and tries to stay in touch as much as possible without being a pest. It’s easy to believe him. He even knows the name of the mailman who has the Distillery on his route.
But being away from the building and the job that has occupied the last decade of your life cannot be easy. Scott relishes the chances to come back for gallery openings. He says that his favorite shows are the ones with lots of artists displaying their work at once.
“I like those kind of deals where you can go through and skim a whole bunch of shows at once,” he says, “see a bunch of people you haven’t seen in a while, and then if there’s a show you really like you can go back to check it out later.”
In Brooklyn, like in Boston, Scott fell easily into a community of artists, this time at the Fowler Arts Collective. The Collective, established by Cecelia Post, is like the Distillery in that it is made up of multiple live/work spaces for artists. The Collective is just over a year old and currently serves 24 artists. Despite being in its infancy, it has already garnered support from the Brooklyn arts community. So far it has hosted seven shows, and has gained a number of local sponsors.
Its studios are semi-private, with walls that do not reach all the way to the ceiling so that, as Scott says, “you know when your neighbors are around.”
Though Scott has no formal administrative position with the Collective, he still has an influence on its operations.
“Scott Chasse is kind of like the mayor of the underground art world,” Adam says, “not only at the Distillery, but also at Fowler Arts Collective. If you want to be a part of an art show that matter in these two places, Scott is the guy to know.”
Aside from renting a studio there and helping to organize shows behind the scenes, he operates a small wood shop to provide panels and frames for other artists. But as much as Scott has given to Fowler and to the Distillery, he still thinks that he is essentially in their debt.
“Without my experiences and opportunities that have come about,” Scott says, “by getting involved with the art communities in South Boston and Greenpoint [Brooklyn], I would not at all be where I am now in my career.”
In addition to numerous curating projects, Scott already has two shows lined up for early next year. One is a two-person show at the Lot F Gallery in Boston, where he is sharing space with Thomas Buildmore, a friend who he has collaborated with before on curating shows.
“For that show,” Scott says, “Tom and I will show our most recent paintings, something that we usually don’t do when we work together. Typically, we curate shows as a team and focus much more on the other artists involved than ourselves.”
One of the shows that Scott and Thomas have collaborated on was done for the Fowler Arts Collective this summer. The show, “Paint it Now” was brought to Brooklyn after two successful ventures at the Distillery. It was, as one might expect from Scott, a collaborative effort. The 18 artists who were part of the Brooklyn show took up brushes, buckets of thick black paint, and nothing else. No paint thinner, no whites or grays to mix with, no canvas. They painted directly on the walls, next to and on top of one another’s work. The only direction from Scott was to work with the materials as they were, that they just wanted “harsh black on white.”
Scott will soon be taking “Paint it Now” to yet another audience, showing in Philadelphia, again with the help of Thomas Buildmore.
As Scott describes it, “The result is a giant collaborative mural that encompasses the entire space and the viewers that come to see it.”
The three times this exhibit has been shown, it has been a success. The mix of pop-culture and religious symbolism, of tight stencils and freehand figures that dripped down the walls somehow ended up working, pleasing everybody who bothered to speak up about it.
After the show, the walls were painted white again. It lasted only as long as it took for the artists to have fun making it, and for an audience to come enjoy it with them.
Scott is also currently involved with Ugly Art Room, a Brooklyn project which sets up shows in non-traditional settings. The most recent part of this series was a show called “Peep Show” in which all the work in the show was situated behind a wall, with the audience peeking through Viewmasters to see it.
That, it seems, is another part of what Scott is about. Bringing together disparate elements, doing your best to plan ahead but letting little accidents and unexpected turns take you where they will. In the end, what matters, or what seems to matter to Scott, is that is was a joy to make, and that it meant something to someone for a discreet moment.
And so it is with Scott’s work. Though he has never pursued an art degree, he has been painting since high school, where he was in an advanced placement art class, where he was given a college recommendation from his art teacher without asking for it, where he was pushed to go on to art school by the same teacher, but never did.
Back then, and up till about 2007, his work looked much different from his current paintings.
“I had been painting vibrant paintings made up of solid colors with bold black outlines,” he says, “very graphic, almost cartoonish. It was goofy stuff, probably derivative of skateboard graphics.”
Scott still calls skateboard culture one of his biggest inspirations, and says that his work would be vastly different without it. He also still has fond memories of the punk shows that he used to go to in the late 80s and early 90s, where he saw his first handmade fliers, and got his first glimpse of the skateboard aesthetic that he still loves.
“The first show I saw in Boston was at the Rat, a dingy dive of a basement in Kenmore Square, long gone now. These were all-ages shows, often on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.”
This may even be the place where Scott found out how it really feels to be part of a self-sufficient community.
“You’d have straight-edge kids, skinheads, and punks all in the same room sometimes, sizing each other up and taking out their aggression in the pit. At that point, the whole moshing concept hadn’t gone mainstream yet – it was like this secret thing that only existed in this subculture.”
So he carried one element of this culture with him all the way to 2007, painting with his solid chunks of color. He was also working with screen prints. One open studio, someone came by with a small screen print that they wanted reproduced on a larger scale. The work, he said, would have been too difficult to finish using any method he already knew.
“Although I know how to screen print pretty well,” Scott says, “I’m not a pro and it just seemed like it was gonna be a job that was out of my reach.”
So, on advice from a friend, he convinced his new client to let him paint the work instead of screen printing it.
“It wasn’t necessarily any easier to produce,” he says, “but I just felt more confident doing it that way.”
He ended up with a large painting, purely black and white, pixelated as an enlarged screen print would be. He enjoyed the work, he says, and as he continued with it, it reminded him of the fliers that he used to make for punk shows as he got more into the culture in the 80s and 90s.
“I would go to the library with a handful of dimes and a pair of scissors,” Scott says, “and just blow something up and cut out the pieces and tape’em down and copy that one and then have to add more things and copy it again. After doing that ten times it’s been Xeroxed so much it loses all the midtones. I guess for me it’s nostalgic, but it’s also very aesthetically pleasing. Once I started it was hard to stop.”
The collision of chance and nostalgia has brought Scott to his current body of work, all done in his now signature Xeroxed/punk flier/screen print style, ranging in subject from the minutiae of car engines, to birds, to cheerleaders, to William Shatner and other pop-culture icons such as Burt Reynolds decked out with garish, variegated backgrounds, the latter of which were shown at a Brooklyn exhibit called “The Man, the Myth, the Moustache.” (Of the project, Adam says, “Who doesn’t want an overly gaudy portrait of Burt Reynolds giving you the sexy eye hanging in the foyer? Nobody.”)
Though his subject matter, and even sometimes the way he chooses to represent it, may come off as goofy, Scott still takes his work seriously.
When asked once by the City Paper in Philadelphia, where one of his Burt Reynolds exhibits was hanging in a recreated “bachelor pad” basement bar, whether his art was meant to be taken seriously or not, he responded,
“My work can be seen as humorous and entertaining just as easily as it can be questioned and deeply thought about. I toil over aesthetics and hope that, if nothing else, visitors will recognize and appreciate this.”
In the same interview he went deeper into why exactly one would spend a large chunk of their time painting Burt Reynolds over and over again.
“To me, the look on Burt’s face exemplifies an overly confident machismo circa late ’70s and early ’80s, a time when there was an accepted percentage of chauvinism much higher than today.”
But, again, nostalgia pops up in an unexpected place.
“Burt reminds of what my dad looked like when I was a kid,” Scott said. So that collision of inventiveness, of a shared social history, and a much more personal vision of Scott’s past, again determine the course of his work.
The work, he went on to say, was meant to be a comment on the changing face of masculinity, but if one chooses to see it as simply a recreation of a bygone era, “I’m not offended by that interpretation at all.”
So that gives us yet another, and maybe the best, way to describe Scott. He uses lowbrow subjects to make highbrow statements. He has no problem making work that only he has all the keys to. He is serious about what he does, but does not demand that you are as well. All he wants is for you to show up, enjoy yourself, and let the work reach you.
The thing about Scott is that his title means something to him. Not in the sense that having a title sets him apart from other people (as Adam O’Day, a Distillery tenant says, “[Scott] has a real blue collar view of the arts. He never looks down his nose at people or their artwork.”), but in the sense that, to him, the community is an extremely important part of the art world, and may even be the point of "the whole art thing."
“Being a part of the arts community is a great way to get inspired,” Scott says, “and to gauge your own successes and failures.”
Part of this love of community may stem from the fact that Scott never went to art school.
By not studying art, he says, “I lacked the experience of being around a group of other artists as colleagues.”
Though urged by an art teacher to pursue an art degree after finishing high school in 1992, Scott instead got by working part time jobs so that he could spend the rest of his time playing music.
“I used to be afraid to admit that I didn’t go to art school,” Scott said one morning while setting up for the opening of the gallery’s latest show, “but now I kind of… I wouldn’t say that I embrace it, but I’m not afraid of it anymore either.”
Much of the work he did after high school was skilled manual labor working for the owner of a Cinema Pub in his home town of Amesbury, Mass.
“Each day was different,” Scott says. “Some days I’d be disassembling a toilet, tiling a floor, or repairing drywall; other days I’d be splicing together 35mm motion picture reels for that night’s movie at the Cinema Pub.”
In 1995, at age 20, Scott moved to Haverhill, Mass. There he opened a coffee house with a partner his own age. They used the space to host events, like performances by local bands and poetry readings.
“It was a popular venue while it lasted,” Scott says, “which was up until 1999.”
The business was never profitable, though, so after it closed, Scott went back to working odd jobs in Amesbury for a couple of years. This lasted, as Scott says, “until I got my act back together and moved to Boston for school in 2001.”
Instead of studying art when he got to Boston, as he had been prodded to do so many years ago, he studied audio production at a school which was then called Massachusetts Communications College, but has since been bought out by the Art Institute and changed its name to the New England Institute of Art and Design.
In lieu of a formal art history education, Scott has turned to his friends and fellow artists.
“I always absorb a lot from people who did go to school,” Scott says. “I try to listen as much as possible.”
This has worked out for him so far. Scott does not know everything there is to know about his creative ancestors, and he is not the type to spend a whole day walking through a museum, taking in the works of the masters (“I get art fatigue.”), but he knows how to paint, and he knows how to set up a show, and he knows how to enjoy doing it.
“It’s clear to me that he makes his own work purely for his own enjoyment,” Adam says. “It just so happens that everyone else loves it, too.”
This culture of mutually-affirming artists is the one thing that Scott may have benefited from had he gone to art school, but he has finally found it at the Distillery. More than just a gallery, the building has studios and apartments for more than 100 artists on its upper floors.
“When I moved to the Distillery,” Scott says, “it was the first time that I was around a large group of artists at different levels of their careers, but all existing as equal at the same time.”
He first encountered the Distillery in 2002, the year after he moved to Boston from Amesbury. When he first came to Boston, he lived in Mission Hill for a short time. His roommate there had a friend at the Distillery who was moving out (“We had an in.”), and Scott and his roommate took the space over.
“I knew as soon as we got to the building to take a look that it was the type of place I would love to be a part of,” Scott says.
As luck would have it, at the same time that Scott was moving into the Distillery, the building was undergoing major renovations, and Scott, just starting out at school, was hired as a laborer. As the gallery’s management grew more familiar with Scott, he was given more projects until he was offered his current position in 2007.
His current work has moved from the realm of physical labor into more of a planning role. He is responsible for curating shows in the Distillery’s main gallery, and for organizing the Distillery’s part in South Boston Open Studios.
The gallery, with its catwalks, its leather couch, its white pillars taking up parts of the space, can feel somewhat cluttered. But when people start showing up to see the work, it almost forces them to interact. The current exhibit, by Distillery tenant Vanessa Irzyk, is a collection of abstract multi-media works, whose bright colors and wild forms clash with the black and white austerity of the gallery, leaping from the walls it seems.
“We switch out the shows every six weeks or so,” Scott says, “so we’re constantly looking for what we’re going to have next. Or even if we have three shows lined up, we’re looking for a fourth.”
South Boston Open Studios takes place twice per year, once in the spring and once in the fall. It involves opening up the Distillery’s studios and those of the smaller King Terminal down the street, for two days of gallery exhibits with most artists present.
His typical day requires him to spend time in front of his computer, answering e-mails, updating the Distillery’s Web site, dealing with social media. This is all in service of the artists in residence there, making sure that their work has a chance to see the light of day.
“If it weren’t for dudes like him,” Adam says, “lazy artists like myself wouldn’t have a chance to show or get involved as much.”
There are currently 68 units at the Distillery. Of those, 30 serve as both home and studio for their occupants. The rest are studios only, which are rented out for artists who have a place to live, but need a place to work. Usually, though, more than one tenant occupies a space, which means that all told Scott is responsible for meeting the needs of around 140 artists.
His work, done as it is mostly on his computer, does not require him to be at the Distillery more than once per month, which has allowed him to make his recent move to Brooklyn.
“My girlfriend got a great postdoc position in New York City,” Scott says, “so she moved there full time and I was kind of bouncing between New York and Boston for a couple of years. Last year was actually the first time I didn’t renew a lease in Boston.”
Scott, however, does not let the Distillery grow too distant, even when he is away for weeks at a time. He says he checks in as often as he can, and tries to stay in touch as much as possible without being a pest. It’s easy to believe him. He even knows the name of the mailman who has the Distillery on his route.
But being away from the building and the job that has occupied the last decade of your life cannot be easy. Scott relishes the chances to come back for gallery openings. He says that his favorite shows are the ones with lots of artists displaying their work at once.
“I like those kind of deals where you can go through and skim a whole bunch of shows at once,” he says, “see a bunch of people you haven’t seen in a while, and then if there’s a show you really like you can go back to check it out later.”
In Brooklyn, like in Boston, Scott fell easily into a community of artists, this time at the Fowler Arts Collective. The Collective, established by Cecelia Post, is like the Distillery in that it is made up of multiple live/work spaces for artists. The Collective is just over a year old and currently serves 24 artists. Despite being in its infancy, it has already garnered support from the Brooklyn arts community. So far it has hosted seven shows, and has gained a number of local sponsors.
Its studios are semi-private, with walls that do not reach all the way to the ceiling so that, as Scott says, “you know when your neighbors are around.”
Though Scott has no formal administrative position with the Collective, he still has an influence on its operations.
“Scott Chasse is kind of like the mayor of the underground art world,” Adam says, “not only at the Distillery, but also at Fowler Arts Collective. If you want to be a part of an art show that matter in these two places, Scott is the guy to know.”
Aside from renting a studio there and helping to organize shows behind the scenes, he operates a small wood shop to provide panels and frames for other artists. But as much as Scott has given to Fowler and to the Distillery, he still thinks that he is essentially in their debt.
“Without my experiences and opportunities that have come about,” Scott says, “by getting involved with the art communities in South Boston and Greenpoint [Brooklyn], I would not at all be where I am now in my career.”
In addition to numerous curating projects, Scott already has two shows lined up for early next year. One is a two-person show at the Lot F Gallery in Boston, where he is sharing space with Thomas Buildmore, a friend who he has collaborated with before on curating shows.
“For that show,” Scott says, “Tom and I will show our most recent paintings, something that we usually don’t do when we work together. Typically, we curate shows as a team and focus much more on the other artists involved than ourselves.”
One of the shows that Scott and Thomas have collaborated on was done for the Fowler Arts Collective this summer. The show, “Paint it Now” was brought to Brooklyn after two successful ventures at the Distillery. It was, as one might expect from Scott, a collaborative effort. The 18 artists who were part of the Brooklyn show took up brushes, buckets of thick black paint, and nothing else. No paint thinner, no whites or grays to mix with, no canvas. They painted directly on the walls, next to and on top of one another’s work. The only direction from Scott was to work with the materials as they were, that they just wanted “harsh black on white.”
Scott will soon be taking “Paint it Now” to yet another audience, showing in Philadelphia, again with the help of Thomas Buildmore.
As Scott describes it, “The result is a giant collaborative mural that encompasses the entire space and the viewers that come to see it.”
The three times this exhibit has been shown, it has been a success. The mix of pop-culture and religious symbolism, of tight stencils and freehand figures that dripped down the walls somehow ended up working, pleasing everybody who bothered to speak up about it.
After the show, the walls were painted white again. It lasted only as long as it took for the artists to have fun making it, and for an audience to come enjoy it with them.
Scott is also currently involved with Ugly Art Room, a Brooklyn project which sets up shows in non-traditional settings. The most recent part of this series was a show called “Peep Show” in which all the work in the show was situated behind a wall, with the audience peeking through Viewmasters to see it.
That, it seems, is another part of what Scott is about. Bringing together disparate elements, doing your best to plan ahead but letting little accidents and unexpected turns take you where they will. In the end, what matters, or what seems to matter to Scott, is that is was a joy to make, and that it meant something to someone for a discreet moment.
And so it is with Scott’s work. Though he has never pursued an art degree, he has been painting since high school, where he was in an advanced placement art class, where he was given a college recommendation from his art teacher without asking for it, where he was pushed to go on to art school by the same teacher, but never did.
Back then, and up till about 2007, his work looked much different from his current paintings.
“I had been painting vibrant paintings made up of solid colors with bold black outlines,” he says, “very graphic, almost cartoonish. It was goofy stuff, probably derivative of skateboard graphics.”
Scott still calls skateboard culture one of his biggest inspirations, and says that his work would be vastly different without it. He also still has fond memories of the punk shows that he used to go to in the late 80s and early 90s, where he saw his first handmade fliers, and got his first glimpse of the skateboard aesthetic that he still loves.
“The first show I saw in Boston was at the Rat, a dingy dive of a basement in Kenmore Square, long gone now. These were all-ages shows, often on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.”
This may even be the place where Scott found out how it really feels to be part of a self-sufficient community.
“You’d have straight-edge kids, skinheads, and punks all in the same room sometimes, sizing each other up and taking out their aggression in the pit. At that point, the whole moshing concept hadn’t gone mainstream yet – it was like this secret thing that only existed in this subculture.”
So he carried one element of this culture with him all the way to 2007, painting with his solid chunks of color. He was also working with screen prints. One open studio, someone came by with a small screen print that they wanted reproduced on a larger scale. The work, he said, would have been too difficult to finish using any method he already knew.
“Although I know how to screen print pretty well,” Scott says, “I’m not a pro and it just seemed like it was gonna be a job that was out of my reach.”
So, on advice from a friend, he convinced his new client to let him paint the work instead of screen printing it.
“It wasn’t necessarily any easier to produce,” he says, “but I just felt more confident doing it that way.”
He ended up with a large painting, purely black and white, pixelated as an enlarged screen print would be. He enjoyed the work, he says, and as he continued with it, it reminded him of the fliers that he used to make for punk shows as he got more into the culture in the 80s and 90s.
“I would go to the library with a handful of dimes and a pair of scissors,” Scott says, “and just blow something up and cut out the pieces and tape’em down and copy that one and then have to add more things and copy it again. After doing that ten times it’s been Xeroxed so much it loses all the midtones. I guess for me it’s nostalgic, but it’s also very aesthetically pleasing. Once I started it was hard to stop.”
The collision of chance and nostalgia has brought Scott to his current body of work, all done in his now signature Xeroxed/punk flier/screen print style, ranging in subject from the minutiae of car engines, to birds, to cheerleaders, to William Shatner and other pop-culture icons such as Burt Reynolds decked out with garish, variegated backgrounds, the latter of which were shown at a Brooklyn exhibit called “The Man, the Myth, the Moustache.” (Of the project, Adam says, “Who doesn’t want an overly gaudy portrait of Burt Reynolds giving you the sexy eye hanging in the foyer? Nobody.”)
Though his subject matter, and even sometimes the way he chooses to represent it, may come off as goofy, Scott still takes his work seriously.
When asked once by the City Paper in Philadelphia, where one of his Burt Reynolds exhibits was hanging in a recreated “bachelor pad” basement bar, whether his art was meant to be taken seriously or not, he responded,
“My work can be seen as humorous and entertaining just as easily as it can be questioned and deeply thought about. I toil over aesthetics and hope that, if nothing else, visitors will recognize and appreciate this.”
In the same interview he went deeper into why exactly one would spend a large chunk of their time painting Burt Reynolds over and over again.
“To me, the look on Burt’s face exemplifies an overly confident machismo circa late ’70s and early ’80s, a time when there was an accepted percentage of chauvinism much higher than today.”
But, again, nostalgia pops up in an unexpected place.
“Burt reminds of what my dad looked like when I was a kid,” Scott said. So that collision of inventiveness, of a shared social history, and a much more personal vision of Scott’s past, again determine the course of his work.
The work, he went on to say, was meant to be a comment on the changing face of masculinity, but if one chooses to see it as simply a recreation of a bygone era, “I’m not offended by that interpretation at all.”
So that gives us yet another, and maybe the best, way to describe Scott. He uses lowbrow subjects to make highbrow statements. He has no problem making work that only he has all the keys to. He is serious about what he does, but does not demand that you are as well. All he wants is for you to show up, enjoy yourself, and let the work reach you.
