Prestidigitations & Permutations
by Karl F. Volkmar, THE NEW ORLEANS ART REVIEW
Attemptuous, 2008
Gregory Scott’s “Outside the Frame” mixed media work is more fun than walking through one of the old fun houses at the state fair or a mystery spot along the highway leading to a popular vacation site. In his updating of American nineteenth century trompe l’oeil illusionist painting, Scott employs modern representational technologies to create works that delight the mind as well as fool the eye. Combinations of flat screen HD video, oil paint on panel, and archival digital printing create layers of illusion that confound the viewer’s ability to distinguish between static and time-based representational media. One delights in being deceived by virtual reality without any necessity for suspending disbelief.
If Scott had worked as an artist during the first century before and after the Common Era, one would have found him authoring fresco painting at Pompeii or Herculaneum in what has been described as the fourth style in which faux design, pictorial illusionism, and the illusion of illusion are integrated into a whole interior design. In referencing individual works to specific artists and forms of kitsch, Scott succeeds in expanding the conceptual dimensions of his work beyond the simple fun and delight in media manipulation.
With a display of wit shared with Hairy Who?’s H. C. Westermann and Jim Nutt, Scott can make biting commentary while making one laugh and say “Wow!” Appreciation of Color Grid is increased if one is familiar with the sardonic and ironic academic realism of surrealist Rene Magritte. Fridge parodies both banal refrigerator art as well as Rauschenberg’s sophisticated combines of the fifties. Attemptuous spoofs Manet’s Olympia with the humor of Benny Hill comedies or a Saturday Night Live skit. The saccharine shopping mall confections of Thomas Kincaid are the inspiration for a Rowan and Martin skit a la old television’s Laugh-In and Hee Haw in Tossed. Escher-esque accepts the challenge of the popular work of M.C. Escher by animating the earlier artist’s perceptual conundrums.
While it is necessary to see Scott’s work in the gallery to comprehend it as a whole, one can spice up the experience by first visiting the gallery website where the artist’s works are presented as isolated images with the even texture of a digital image. One cannot be certain whether the image represents the work itself or a photograph of the work in the ambient environment in which it is exhibited. The digital homogenization of the different media creates a situation in which video, painting, and digital print are indistinguishable one from another. One does not know what is art and what is accident. The fun comes in trying to guess which area is which media before visiting the gallery exhibition.
Even when one knows how it is done, it is still fascinating. I invited several techies where I work to visit both the gallery’s and the artist’s sites. Even they, with their jaded ability to be impressed, were challenged, and delighted, by the seamless viewing experience of Scott’s work.