NYAB Event - Scott Ingram “Seams and Transitions”

Scott Ingram “Seams and Transitions”

Elizabeth Houston Gallery

This event has ended.

With an emphasis on materiality and form, the work of painter Scott Ingram in Seams and Transitions engages the artist’s contemporary surroundings with an established modernist dialogue.

Ingram has spent years exploring the material nature of urban architecture through various mediums including sculpture, installation, drawing and photography. Made entirely from construction materials this body of work calls to mind both the physicality of Formalist painting as well as the theoretical impact of Modernism. This dialogue surrounding materiality has influenced Ingram’s aesthetic and ethos through out his career.

Deeply influenced by the reductive language of Franz Kline and Brice Marden as well as the architectural influence of Mies Van der Rohe, Ingram’s work attempts both to communicate with and to build upon the existing languages imbedded within this modernist context. In recollection of a specific moment of transition in his work after having seen a Franz Kline painting at the St Louis Art Museum Ingram made the decision to approach his work more formally. Following there after was the creation of Ingram’s Sheetrock paintings, a moment in which the artist noticed a vital shift affected by the new work, “creating an immediate visual reference while also speaking of nothing.”

In Seams and Transitions marble dust and gesso is mixed to resemble joint compound, troweled across squares of drab brown and gray-blue, alluding to both modernist painting and to humble construction work. The work Untitled number 48 employs this kind of duality with gestural marks emphasized in white paint against a neutral composition of color and form, the viewer fixates somewhere between its direct material evocation its abstracted performance.

Functional aspects of the made world also act as a lens of reinterpretation here. In this regard, Ingram follows a tradition marked by others in the late 20th century. Seminal modernist works such as Haim Steinbach’s shelves and consumer objects come to the viewer’s mind, as well as Scott Burton’s benches and the austere crates of Richard Artschwager.
Ingram’s practice however does not entirely rely on theoretical context. The artist admits to using color based on memory. As seen in the work Untitled # 41, Ingram’s use of an evocative orange color within the painting functions both as an experimental nostalgic choice as well as a place of activation for the material. In the work Untitled # 42 Ingram investigates experimentation further, touching upon minimalist aesthetic with six sheetrock screws driven through the face of the painting, addressing an understated visual literalism specific to minimalist painting.

Ingram lays out a profound respect for certain humble human endeavors, such as construction and building. He couples this attitude with a sense of admiration pertaining to the grand narrative of modernism. In keeping with the self-referential and philosophical back bone of the modernist ideology these works are executed somewhere in between the bold gesture of Abstract Expressionism and the pragmatism of a building project.

Employing both experimentation and deliberate intention, this new exhibition of work displays Ingram’s sensitive approach and close examination of the reprised nuances of materiality, aesthetic and art historical theory in Contemporary painting.

Scott Ingram was born in Drumright, Oklahoma and grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. Since 1995, he has exhibited throughout the United States as well as Spain and Canada. In 2011 he was a resident at the MacDowell Colony and in 2013, he was awarded a Working Artists Fellowship from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Amongst other awards Ingram has twice been a finalist for the Hugdens Prize at the Jacqueline Casey Hudgens Center for the Arts, in Duluth, Georgia. His work is collected by numerous private and corporate collections, as well as the High Museum of Art. Scott lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.