ERIK SCOLLON
ANYTHING WITH A HOLE… IS ALSO A BEAD
EXHIBITION DATES:
MARCH 19 - APRIL 23, 2022
Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Anything With A Hole…Is Also A Bead, an exhibition of new work by San Francisco artist Erik Scollon. The exhibition will be on view Saturday March 19th through Saturday April 23rd.
Anything With A Hole…Is Also A Bead, Scollon continues various threads that were laid down in previous exhibitions at Romer Young Gallery - the decorative, the sentimental, the queer, the allusive. Rather than follow any one single theory to act as the framework or entry point to the things he has made, Scollon offers up a constellation of ideas and ties them together - both literally and figuratively. Incorporating ceramic beads, macrame structures, and painterly vessels. Anything With A Hole…Is Also A Bead finds another way to explore themes of embodiment, perception, and self determination in relation to status and style.
Working slowly and meditatively, Scollon rolls, pierces, fires and glazes each bead, one by one. Through slow repetition and accumulation, the beads are then strung and knotted into intricate, colorful panels that exist as an admixture of adornment, talismans, mirrors, windows, modernist grids, and queer non objective forms. His abstract, singular forms create a field through which variations are played out, but closer inspection reveals that pattern, repetition and variation don’t hold up and are interrupted with thoughtfully placed beads and knots that create permutations. Scollon, as with all his work, creates such unique encounters that draw attention to the spaces between notions - chaos and order, decorative and conceptual, kitsch and highbrow, subject and object, inside and outside, yes and no. Here, in this exhibition, the subtle unraveling of the grid presents a kind of interruption that invites the viewer to question - what is being sublimated?
Scollon thinks through these macrame forms via the logic of queer versatility to open space for connection and possibility. His forms invite a state of negotiation, activating the viewer’s encounter and opening up the ways in which the viewer is implicated in the work. “Identification is not stable, because it is always in relation to a thing outside of itself. {any} kind of identification is temporarily formed.” The works become portals to an engaged experience for the viewer, at once seductive and thwarting. The larger fields invite a very physical engagement, relating to our bodies more than our eyes. But the details and irregularities seduce us to come closer, connecting in a more intimate space - the gaze.
Viewers are met with eyes embedded throughout. The eyes, the gaze, become a vehicle for communication. Jean Paul Sartre saw the gaze as the “battleground for the self to define and redefine itself; we become aware of our self as subject only when confronted with the gaze of the Other and become aware of our self as object.” The viewer is conscious of being seen and is free to engage in a playful exchange - flipping between the object being looked at, and the subject doing the looking. The interplay between the two gazes - between that of the artist via the work and that of the viewer - confuses the boundaries between the two roles until it becomes unclear who exactly is gazing at whom. In such, Scollon continually renegotiates a certain power dynamic.
Scollon’s companion exhibition, also entitled Anything With A Hole…Is Also A Bead, will be on view at the diRosa Center for Contemporary Art through July 3, 2022.
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