Scott Gordon: Human Stain

SCOTT GORDON
"Human Stain"
collage and assemblage
Opening Reception: Friday, February 6 from 6-9 p.m.
Exhibit Dates: Feb 6 – 28, 2015
Gallery hours: M-F 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat.& Sun. by appointment

Scott Gordon is a highly productive visual artist. His studio is plentiful with artworks neatly piled on tables, and both half finished on the walls and floor, or finished and framed on the walls, yet this is no Warholian "art factory." He is enviously prolific, yet his process still contains the unenviable struggles of self challenge. The blunt refusal to rewrite the same play over and over, as if doing so would represent a personal defeat of some kind. It would. Every artist on some level, knows that. He has distinct but ineffable goals to be reached, and the productivity I speak of is partly due to his sense of time running away…so little time, so many collages.

The artwork itself is made up of paper scraps, odds and ends, paint, tickets and the like, reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters, the artists' artist from almost 100 years before. Schwitters indeed showed us all the way. Where are the monuments to Schwitters I ask? We all owe him a lot. Schwitters was the printing press on which Gordon writes his visual letters.

These "letters" are personal sensitive missives, each delivering a tasty heartfelt morsel, rather than a breaking of an art world paradigm. Gordon writes the untold story, the story between the lines, the story that cannot really be told by ordinary means. His work is a noble attempt at the seemingly impossible. Each work represents another go at it, another stab at recording what we cannot understand, but can only experience. A reading book is a parallel to illusionism in visual art. The words are there to point at other places. We are not meant to stare endlessly at the words themselves. Gordon's scraps, book pages, word, and paint break the flow of straight ahead narrative into pieces, each part confounding the linear, and rendering these parts into a gently confrontational present. An arrested moment. All roads into the future are blocked, and here we are with his work…and it is tasty…fine, tuning fork fine.  Written by Colin Fraser Gray