It's amazing how much Scott Listfield's works are speaking about our contemporary life. In past years, I would have said that these works are visions of the future, metaphors for climate change, capitalism and totalitarianism. Well, 2020 has had it all. With a pandemic, social unrest and the current president sending troops to "handle" their own citizens, we have become the chaos and wreckage seen in Listfield's works.
Spoke Art is pleased to present Quarantine, a solo exhibition by Scott Listfield on view at Hashimoto Contemporay NYC from September 19—October 10, 2020. Quarantine will be Listfield’s second solo exhibition at Spoke Art, where he will be exhibiting a new series of paintings which chronicles the adventures of the artists central protagonist (the astronaut). “I began working on this series of paintings while the world was in lockdown," Listfield says. "Most of the planet was stuck at home riding out a pandemic unlike anything we've experienced in 100 years. City streets were empty, buildings boarded up, coyotes and tumbleweeds inhabited downtown. I began to hear from people that the real world was looking more and more like one of my paintings. Needless to say, this gave me pause. It's always good as an artist to feel like you're in the zeitgeist. It's another thing entirely to get the uneasy feeling that you've predicted a fairly bleak present. I was struggling with what to do with this knowledge.
"My work is very much about exploration. All I've had to explore recently is the darker depths of my own mind. And so in these new paintings, the astronaut that roams my work wanders through deserted cities literally tipping and falling. Where gravity has its own free will. Bits and pieces of a recognizable pop culture landscape fall through these scenes sideways, toppling along with statues... Things break. Things burn. But the astronaut, like us, keeps going.”
