Scott Treleaven
19 Feb - 21 Mar 2009
© Scott Treleaven
Old World Underground Where Are You, 2008
ink, watercolour, photocopy of original photos, paper
103.5 x 73 cm
Old World Underground Where Are You, 2008
ink, watercolour, photocopy of original photos, paper
103.5 x 73 cm
SCOTT TRELEAVEN
"Silver Make-Up"
Preview: Thursday February 19, 2009, 8-10 pm
Exhibition Dates: February 19 - March 21, 2009
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Friday 12 – 8 pm and Saturday 12 – 5 pm
The Breeder is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Canadian born, Paris based artist Scott Treleaven in Athens.
The work of an artist is an act of creation. Transforming the mundane material world into vital, dynamic content, art is in a sense, the act of giving a soul to that which would otherwise never live, the re-animation of charcoal dust and paper into sentient beings, flickering lights and shadows into faces of the divine.
A fusion of watercolor, cut paper montage, engraving, photography and illustration, Scott Treleaven's intimate visual works have rightfully been called the art of incision, seamlessly incorporating film frames and photocopies with deep ink washed expanses and graphite fields. The demure palette of neutral tones represented in this carefully considered collection of Treleaven’s work, exposes us to his current investigation on establishing time, place and content through compositional and representational design. It is an exercise in re-constructing the natural or constructing the naturalistic, through technical methods of framing and de-framing, merging and unifying vastly different source media through the flexibility of collage.
Floating in dark urban expanses or charnel corners, the elegant form of the slender, stony figures inhabiting these works allude both to the devotional sculpture of sepulchers and the ecstatic moments of youthful play. This combination of sacred dedicational and erotic passion for the male body, well developed in Symbolist iconography, appears to question and subvert traditional religious dogma. It is an examination of the often obscured intersection of art, sex, and spirituality. The subtle, near gothic eroticism running through the subtext of the works, calls to mind the similarly ground breaking styles of cinematic legends such as Val Del Omar, Sergei Parajanov, or Kenneth Anger, who like Treleaven himself, have made their own uncanny observances explicit vis a vis their art. With this near beatific aspect also comes a dissolute melancholy, incarnated here through the postures of brutally beautiful anti-heros, frozen in desperate passion or lost in solitude.
Inspired by the 1898 self-portraits of photographer F. Holland Day, Treleaven’s basement level film installation, Last 7 Words, features the giant benign image of art iconoclast Genesis P-Orridge, as captured in the warm glow of super8. The slow rotation of her remarkable self-sculpted personage is punctuated by periodic white outs. As explained by the artist, “my own personal 'last seven words' are both a governing mystic principle and the cornerstone of all perception and our connection to all things. They are: ‘without you I would not be here.’ These could also be the first words, for that same reason. The obliteration/return of the image into whiteness underscores this idea.”
The film, like the exhibition in its entirety, is a meditation on art and its ability to lend form to the boundaries and fragilities of perception.
Scott Treleaven’s work has recently been exhibited in The Boys Of Summer at the Fireplace Project, East Hampton, in Male-works from the collection of Vince Aletti in White Columns, New York, in Only The Paranoid Survive in Hudson Valley Centre for Contemporary Art and in the Montreal Biennial. His films have been screened in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
An afterparty at Intrepid Fox, Triptolemou 30, Gkazi, Athens, will follow the opening.
An introduction to Scott Treleaven’s work by writer Dennis Cooper:
‘Writers who tackle Scott Treleaven’s powerful and exquisitely configured art, no matter how smitten their approach or noble and subservient their intentions, are doomed to dismantle and thereby negate the work’s intoxicating spell, thereby providing little more than sincere directions to those who approach elusive, defiant, and inexplicably felt art like Treleaven’s as solvable puzzles composed of standard if particularized influences, referents, and telling personal experiences. Google this artist’s name and read the samey stacks of names and terms already laid before his work by writers determined to subdivide it into nothing more than neatly parsed out evidence of his oddly concurrent interests in the occult, high romanticism, the cut-ups of Burroughs and Gysin and the messy designs of Queer zine makers, sex, beauty, the trippy formalities of old experimental films, etc. These writers, who it should be noted are often reasonably successful in their background checks and educated guesses, have given the more literal minded art aficionados their beloved explanation while turning something that’s meticulously confounding into a mythical treasure map. What these writers haven’t done and will never do as long as they see words as visual art’s rightful coroner is to begin to demystify Treleaven’s powerfully deep, murky, defiantly illogical, mystifying work. So while he deserves these written effigies and will continue to accrue them like all singularly important artists do in the end, what he really deserves are writers who seek to find a way to lose control of their precious, eviscerating language and become his work’s helpless, somehow helpfully stammering effigies themselves. This state of grace and act of linguistic surrender that I’m suggesting might do greater justice to Scott Treleaven’s art is not what this ultimately off-kilter introduction has achieved in the slightest, but you get the idea’.
-- Dennis Cooper
"Silver Make-Up"
Preview: Thursday February 19, 2009, 8-10 pm
Exhibition Dates: February 19 - March 21, 2009
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Friday 12 – 8 pm and Saturday 12 – 5 pm
The Breeder is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Canadian born, Paris based artist Scott Treleaven in Athens.
The work of an artist is an act of creation. Transforming the mundane material world into vital, dynamic content, art is in a sense, the act of giving a soul to that which would otherwise never live, the re-animation of charcoal dust and paper into sentient beings, flickering lights and shadows into faces of the divine.
A fusion of watercolor, cut paper montage, engraving, photography and illustration, Scott Treleaven's intimate visual works have rightfully been called the art of incision, seamlessly incorporating film frames and photocopies with deep ink washed expanses and graphite fields. The demure palette of neutral tones represented in this carefully considered collection of Treleaven’s work, exposes us to his current investigation on establishing time, place and content through compositional and representational design. It is an exercise in re-constructing the natural or constructing the naturalistic, through technical methods of framing and de-framing, merging and unifying vastly different source media through the flexibility of collage.
Floating in dark urban expanses or charnel corners, the elegant form of the slender, stony figures inhabiting these works allude both to the devotional sculpture of sepulchers and the ecstatic moments of youthful play. This combination of sacred dedicational and erotic passion for the male body, well developed in Symbolist iconography, appears to question and subvert traditional religious dogma. It is an examination of the often obscured intersection of art, sex, and spirituality. The subtle, near gothic eroticism running through the subtext of the works, calls to mind the similarly ground breaking styles of cinematic legends such as Val Del Omar, Sergei Parajanov, or Kenneth Anger, who like Treleaven himself, have made their own uncanny observances explicit vis a vis their art. With this near beatific aspect also comes a dissolute melancholy, incarnated here through the postures of brutally beautiful anti-heros, frozen in desperate passion or lost in solitude.
Inspired by the 1898 self-portraits of photographer F. Holland Day, Treleaven’s basement level film installation, Last 7 Words, features the giant benign image of art iconoclast Genesis P-Orridge, as captured in the warm glow of super8. The slow rotation of her remarkable self-sculpted personage is punctuated by periodic white outs. As explained by the artist, “my own personal 'last seven words' are both a governing mystic principle and the cornerstone of all perception and our connection to all things. They are: ‘without you I would not be here.’ These could also be the first words, for that same reason. The obliteration/return of the image into whiteness underscores this idea.”
The film, like the exhibition in its entirety, is a meditation on art and its ability to lend form to the boundaries and fragilities of perception.
Scott Treleaven’s work has recently been exhibited in The Boys Of Summer at the Fireplace Project, East Hampton, in Male-works from the collection of Vince Aletti in White Columns, New York, in Only The Paranoid Survive in Hudson Valley Centre for Contemporary Art and in the Montreal Biennial. His films have been screened in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
An afterparty at Intrepid Fox, Triptolemou 30, Gkazi, Athens, will follow the opening.
An introduction to Scott Treleaven’s work by writer Dennis Cooper:
‘Writers who tackle Scott Treleaven’s powerful and exquisitely configured art, no matter how smitten their approach or noble and subservient their intentions, are doomed to dismantle and thereby negate the work’s intoxicating spell, thereby providing little more than sincere directions to those who approach elusive, defiant, and inexplicably felt art like Treleaven’s as solvable puzzles composed of standard if particularized influences, referents, and telling personal experiences. Google this artist’s name and read the samey stacks of names and terms already laid before his work by writers determined to subdivide it into nothing more than neatly parsed out evidence of his oddly concurrent interests in the occult, high romanticism, the cut-ups of Burroughs and Gysin and the messy designs of Queer zine makers, sex, beauty, the trippy formalities of old experimental films, etc. These writers, who it should be noted are often reasonably successful in their background checks and educated guesses, have given the more literal minded art aficionados their beloved explanation while turning something that’s meticulously confounding into a mythical treasure map. What these writers haven’t done and will never do as long as they see words as visual art’s rightful coroner is to begin to demystify Treleaven’s powerfully deep, murky, defiantly illogical, mystifying work. So while he deserves these written effigies and will continue to accrue them like all singularly important artists do in the end, what he really deserves are writers who seek to find a way to lose control of their precious, eviscerating language and become his work’s helpless, somehow helpfully stammering effigies themselves. This state of grace and act of linguistic surrender that I’m suggesting might do greater justice to Scott Treleaven’s art is not what this ultimately off-kilter introduction has achieved in the slightest, but you get the idea’.
-- Dennis Cooper