A solo-exhibition of new drawings and sculptures at Centre Clark, Montreal, Quebec.

September 10th to October 10th, 2020

 

Walter Scott’s autofiction comic series Wendy follows the experimental journey of a young artist, from the social play of her post-undergraduate years to the completion of her master’s degree and the creation of a “sincere” body of work. Anyone trying to find their way in the art world will recognize themselves in certain aspects of this character. While the comic strip has a broad readership, in contrast, Scott’s body of sculptures and drawings, produced alongside Wendy, are mostly known to a limited audience who visit art galleries or websites that post exhibition documentation. Scott refrains from fully showing Wendy’s work. The reader can never quite make out what she’s created because her practice is a secondary attribute of her networking activities; in short, a surplus value. To amplify this narrative fact, her art is always hidden behind the heads of visitors during openings. And to confuse matters even further, Scott often jokes that the things he makes in the studio are “by-products.” In front of Scott’s drawings and sculptures – operating in a dispersive mode rather than through synthesis –, we seek to find the remnants of avatars from the comic strip and the author’s biography. However, the plasticity we see in Scott’s work is already present in Wendy’s life when, at key moments, her affects unleashes a metamorphosis. Her eyes become completely black. Her mouth takes on a beak-like appearance. Scott’s recent video, The Pathos of Mandy (2019), adds another knot to this entanglement. Mandy, one of Scott’s alter egos, must live in the aftermath of the success of his own character. He occupies Scott’s position against a filmed backdrop that includes flesh-and-blood interlocutors.

The drawings presented at CLARK include human figures whose faces more closely resemble Scott’s. Nevertheless, a transformation has occurred. His skin is now blue and his eyes bulge out, as if his body had been seized by fear, but not totally obliterated, like Wendy during a crisis. Onto these, Scott has also pasted cut-out photographs of the sculptures he presented at the Remai Modern museum in Saskatoon, in 2018. That exhibition, titled Betazoid in a Fog, was a radical departure from his comics. The works combined headless body parts and more abstract elements, along with stage props—curtains, costumes—in various states of appearance or disappearance.

In his drawing series at CLARK, Scott adds speech bubbles that make his seemingly opaque objects utter a kind of rebuttal to a critic’s lukewarm review of the show. These fragments of discourse, which hover on the edges of the works, are either written by Scott or derived from theoretical texts and evoke an artist’s response when asked to justify every decision that led to this outcome rather than that one. However, incommunicability remains the crux of this new series. In one speech bubble, Scott quotes author Dodie Bellamy: “Trauma is always in the present tense. The body marries the then with the now. Like radical politics, the body knows (-).” The artist adds the phrase “NO GRADATION” to a grotesque figure of himself who appears to be practicing absurd gymnastics on a gray carpet. Like the blue of his skin, the quasi-abstract grey areas on the drawings’ surface are as much a part of the traumatic experience as they are attempts to tear oneself away from it.

Scott makes the sculpture’s negative space the correlate of this colour, which we associate both to excess and to lack. A piece of fabric hung over a clothing rack has cut-out shapes that create silhouettes of arms and hands. An assemblage is made from two facing away chairs and stitched-together jackets. Oversized papier-mâché hands hang from the ends of their sleeves. A pair of pants lie on a plinth. They are riddled with holes with fragments of text revealed from inside them. One of these reads: “Extrapolation renders desire inert.” After Scott’s attempts to give voice to his works in the Remai Modern exhibition, once again, this statement seems to point to the grip of art discourse on the life of forms and the real it cuts off. But whereas gravity’s effect on materials here mimics the movement of falling bodies, Scott doesn’t rely on tropes of failure. Rather, he gives boundaries to our imagination by offering a portion of identity as a living currency, while another variable of his (non-artistic) subjectivity is withdrawn, even as it constitutes the invisible thread that weaves everything together in this exhibition.

– Vincent Bonin (translated in collaboration with Jo-Anne Balcaen)