NYAB Event - Adam Miller & Richard T. Scott "Effigies and Idols"

Adam Miller & Richard T. Scott "Effigies and Idols"

Last Rites Gallery

This event has ended.

"Effigies and Idols," a dual artist exhibition of works by Adam Miller and Richard T Scott. "Effigies and Idols" will be both Miller and Scott's first exhibitions at the gallery and will include ten paintings. Both artists synchronize the traditional with the contemporary as they beckon classical masters with their technique and representation of the human form, whilst chronicling contemporaneous settings. The works in this exhibition reinterpret timeless imagery and beg the viewer to question the meaning in their context.

Miller's paintings are a symphony of fervor as humans intertwine with one another to emotionally withstand an epic catastrophe. The embracing nudes have been stripped of all they once had as the fruits of their evolution inexorably revolted against them, leaving society in ruins. Miller's pieces suggest that man's advancement of technology, although progressive and significant at its height, could alternatively relapse civilization as its ramifications on the environment triumph all else. We are asked to rethink our instantaneous reliance and perhaps adulation of modern day marvels and consider their predestined shortcomings as they slowly yet surely disintegrate the world around us. As technology evolves, it continues to be worshipped and is indispensable, yet a time may not be so far away where these industries will only be left as effigies of a forgotten past.

Scott's paintings include four still lifes of fowls post slaughter, three female portraits and one haunting interior of a levitating infant all sensitively yet effectively hinting at a sense of death and loss. Each painting demonstrates a mastery of light and hue as Scott calls to old master techniques yet imbues these classical practices with a haunting and emotionally evocative narrative. The audience becomes the voyeurs of these frozen moments of time, as death is echoed by subtleties suggested by a jacket draped over a chair in Auld Lang Syne and by a knife left on a counter next to a mangled fowl with a twisted neck in Perchance to Dream. The females in Scott's paintings confirm such suspicions as seen in Presentation and Song of Deborah. In both these works, the females look solemnly away from the viewer and silently bereave and contemplate past events and ones to come. All that remains is a sorrowful yet idolized memory of their losses.

Scott and Miller comment on timeless subjects in contemporary settings. Whether it is the death of one person or the demise of an entire civilization, both artists provoke the definition of idols and effigies as their framework determines it.