Scott Vanderveen

Lives and works in Pine Plains, NY, USA

Artist statement

Broadly, my studio practice is a practice of orientation. Working primarily between the modes of sculpture and painting, my studio practice takes an interdisciplinary, hybrid approach to genre and subject. I am interested in how to best utilize the slippage between different disciplines and how this slippage generates productive or poetic disorientation for a viewer. Found photographs are foundational to my work. The fragments of imagery in circulation in my studio act as landmarks, in both my process and the resultant objects, that help situate artist and viewer in a logic of material, desire, and abstraction. Collected intuitively, through an initial impulse of attraction, their accumulation acts as a psychic indexing over a period of time. These collected photographic signposts are combined with a wide array of materials: swatches of colored paper, paint, fabric, blocks of wood, sheets of reflective plexiglass, grommets, or mesh. In my studio, materiality and process act as obstacles or transistors to the voyeuristic impulse of image collection. Encounters with the possibilities of vinyl, wood, paper, found objects, and cryptic bits of hardware guide my process of transforming the context of images. The material possibilities I am interested in are not only formal but also possibilities of emotional affect, sensation-creation, or world-building inherent in materials themselves. I am interested in the sorts of emotions—empathy, disgust, desire—that can cross boundaries...

Artwork