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Samara Scott Still Life

Samara Scott: Still Life 15/08/2015 - 27/09/2015

Presenting the first exhibition of her work in Scotland, London-based artist Samara Scott takes over Jupiter Artland’s Tin Roof Gallery as part of the 12th edition of the Edinburgh Art Festival.

In this installation we see Scott continuing her trajectory as an artist that tampers with mundane materials to instigate a dialogue interrogating contemporary culture. Contract carpet – a material synonymous with call-centers, car showrooms and NHS dentists – has been ripped apart, redesigned, then reconstituted to create a tapestry that leans on references both subtle and superfluous…

Disney-fied misunderstandings of what art is, awkward sketches, classic landscapes chalked on the pavement, shakey YouTube tutorials about how to make classic impasto on your bathroom wall in just 30 minutes, a British binge with Kirshener, Miro and Matisse drinking sticky flavours of vodka sours, the plasticy-faggy-boozy miasma that emanates from the bottle bank as you push the bottles through the flaps.

Still Life also alludes to the collision of grotty real life and the digital hyperreal – the Photoshop vectors that determine the modern silhouette, the Instagram filters that provide the hues and palette of the desired yet unattainable, the spoony and impatient misuse of the internet by the touchscreen trash generation, the cascading style sheets that respond to our imperfect humanity and burnish the imperfections over.

Scott straddles the borders between disciplines – a painter in its most literal sense, a practitioner who applies her observations as motifs, emblems and veneers, a craftswoman who creates tapestry from polypropylene weave and ersatz marquetry. She weaves and cleaves together daily snippets and consumer chippings to make a pop cultural marmalade. She’s a cynic, a commentator and a participant that lies somewhere in the Venn diagram overlap between expressionism, pointillism and the Claire’s Accessories generation.

“it’s a sensory stimulation tank – like one of those spaceshuttle-simulators you might find in Butlins where even the floor is an LED screen, surround sound rumbles and your seat shakes. You feel Morandi’s bottles on your socks, the dreamworld of German expressionism by the side of your head, crude spaghetti westerns exploding on your right”.