This month, Brooklyn-based artist Scott Albrecht is premiering his show Lessons in Perspective at Paradigm Gallery in Philadelphia, featuring a collection of works on paper, woodworks and sculptures. Lessons in Perspective showcases Albrecht’s most recent body of work sharing a concentrated collection that builds off of his graphic and abstracted styles. Scott’s work continues to find a balance in forms through his bright and bold use of color and shape that is grounded in his use of abstracted typography.
Largely inspired by his reflections on recent events, Lessons in Perspective focusses on the duality of perspective in situations and the need for empathetic resolve. Coming out of a very turbulent 2016, Scott became increasingly interested the divisions among people and the way in which people engaged one another. To Scott, it wasn’t the issues themselves that gave pause, but the way they were discussed and the lack of empathy to one another’s point of view that only seemed to sharpen the edges of conversation and further distance any resolution. Taking notice from these situations, the works within the exhibition reflect on these situations in varying stages of acceptance and action.
The works within this exhibition revolve around a duality in meaning meant to echo the idea of varied perspectives—sometimes both literally as well as visually. You can see this theme emerge in varying ways throughout the works. In one series, two opposing ideas are overlaid on top of one another leaving the end result to be an illegible mix of shapes and forms from both words – the idea being similar to two ideas equally competing for attention but no single idea is able to come through. This can be seen in the “Fear / Love” and “Want / Need” works.
While language is a focal point in Scott’s work, he’s traded in the speed of legibility in an attempt to pause the viewer to consider his motivations both visually as well literally. Writer and New York Times editor Robb Todd wrote “He does not want viewers to simply read the words and walk away. He wants engagement — for the viewer to spend time with the pieces and appreciate the forms and shapes that create the message.” Similarly, artist Shepard Fairey noted "Scott Albrecht in his art finds the elegant tension between the bold and sublime. His abstraction and deconstruction of type forms combined with his sophisticated color theory and surface treatments yield artworks that are immediate, yet command a deeper and closer look."
Scott’s wood work is the result of a meticulous and lengthy process. Starting from a hand-rendered drawing these works are often the result of hours of process and production being made up of dozens, sometimes hundreds of individual pieces that are cut, sanded, painted and re-assembled often in varied depths.