Walter Scott | Tolerance of Ambiguity
May 22–July 25, 2020
Image Courtesy of the Artist.
Virtual Opening with the Artist | Saturday, May 23 at 5pm
WAlter Scott & Brenda Draney In Conversation | Saturday, June 20 at 1pm
“Neurosis is a makeshift: not with regard to “health” but with regard to the “impossible” Bataille speaks of (‘Neurosis is the fearful apprehension of an ultimate impossible,” etc); but this makeshift is the only one that allows for writing (and reading).”
— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
"Sometimes, in my mind’s eye, I put myself in an argument or emotional conflict I feel likely to get wrapped-up in - but in this only-vaguely gratifying act of the imagination, I put myself in the body of someone I have met before, or a fictional character from TV. I imagine what their attitude or disposition would offer to the scenario—that maybe their innate emotional instincts and unique qualities would make a path through the conflict that I would otherwise not come to on my own.
The cartoonist Gabrielle Bell, in her comic Cecil and Jordan in New York, has a character who turns into a chair. In an interview, she says: “My friend who was staying with me, who is the star of that story, had this idea that she wanted to turn into a chair and be taken home by somebody. So I stole her story. She gave it to me.”
The works in this exhibition are situated between the reality of their presence and the documentation of them. This is partially because of a global pandemic, where nobody but the installer will see them in person. But also, the auto-biographical qualities of the works suspended them between fact and fiction. In the board game Operation—the failure of extracting the “Writer’s Block” is jarringly confirmed by the buzzing protestations of the two-dimensional patient. In real life, it’s harder to know if we’re getting anywhere. It takes a lifetime to extract from our bodies the stories we tell ourselves from the stories we’ve been told about who we are. Until we can look closely (usually in hindsight), we can only ever arrive halfway—like a digital image of a printout of a drawing—and maybe we just have to tolerate that for now."
Watch Walter Scott and Brenda Draney’s Full Conversation Here:
Walter Scott b. 1985, is an interdisciplinary artist working across comics, drawing, video, performance and sculpture. His comic series, Wendy, chronicles the continuing misadventures of a young artist in a satirical version of the contemporary art world. Wendy has been featured in Canadian Art, Art in America, and published online on the New Yorker. It was selected for the 2016 edition of Best American Comics, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York. Recent exhibitions include Slipping on the Missing X at Macaulay Fine Art in Vancouver, The Pathos of Mandy at The Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, and Extension of Doubt, at Cooper Cole, in Toronto. Walter was recently an artist-in-residence at the ISCP, in Brooklyn, New York, in 2019. His new graphic novel, Wendy, Master of Art, is available from Drawn and Quarterly in Spring 2020.
