review

Samara Scott

First published by Art Monthly, July 2015

Silks, Eastside Projects, May 16th - 11th July, 2015

Cut into the worn concrete floor of this former cabinetmaker’s workshop is an archipelago of roughly hewn shallow recesses, filled to brimming with a fecund array of domestic perishables. Grouped together under a title that suggests a luxurious unfurling or lateral act of softening, these ‘silks’ present a network of purposely conceived new works for Eastside Projects by the London-based artist Samara Scott. The result is a stunning series of iridescent puddles that shimmer, sprout or conceal their contents, creating an engrossing post-industrial pond-scape for quiet contemplation. Scott is evidently a connoisseur of the iconic paraphernalia of insipid lifestyle consumerism, incorporating Himalayan rock salt, seaweed, crab-eye beans and the now generationally ubiquitous Vita Coco natural coconut water into her repertoire; all hollow promises of vitality and holistic equilibrium retained intact.

Substantiated by quotidian chemical detergents, homeware and fashion accessories (…I glimpsed air-fresheners, fabric softeners, feather boas, scented candles, makeup sponges…), these materials attempt to form a constellatory portraiture, a crystalline image of contemporary consumption habits that focuses on the raw matter constituting, nourishing or assisting in the maintenance of our bodies in an era of pronounced biopolitical production. It is a tidy conceit, and it’s used to unfold a sculptural dramaturgy reminiscent of the poured floor pieces of Lynda Benglis, querying the way that gendered subjectivities might be materially forged and maintained.

In contrast to Scott’s previous show ‘Harvest’, hosted by The Sunday Painter in January 2014, these new works are not bathed in the warm neon-glow of an artificial pink-purple light, but allowed to generate their own radiances. Satin City, 2015, is a gelatinous fissure that modulates colour like a piece of garish molten confectionary. Clubbable Genes presents a matte pool of coagulated baby-blue conditioner studded with opalescent jellies, while Rash Grin suspends white denim in a pool of black liquid suggesting a Balenciaga boutique run through a petrochemical juicing process.

These pooled accumulations become oversized petri-dishes overflowing with self-replicating detritus, fertile laboratories in which the active properties of each combined ingredient are allowed to blossom – through crystallisation, rot or evaporation – into miasmatic topographies and microcosmic zen-like enclosures, appropriate cultivations for an era of pacific garbage patches, smouldering landfill sites, coastal dead zones and pharmaceutically afflicted organisms. The effects are startling, but it pays to navigate the peripheries of these puddles with a keen eye for detail while solemnly asking what forms of complicity this manner of work enacts, where its criticality might reside and, perhaps most importantly, what such a dispiritingly comfortable display of expenditure might betray about our own complacencies – and the limitations of such ambivalent and seemingly fatalist gestures.

It’s difficult not to be swayed by the sumptuousness of Scott’s work; its chosen media are calibrated to make a brazen appeal to the senses. An appeal that often leaves me feeling unsure as to whether the artist is taking a position on some of the urgent matters her sculptures suggest, or merely performing a gleeful, complicitous and ultimately careless exacerbation of material excess, sheltered from criticism by its mute entanglement within the actant matrices of a ‘vibrant materiality’.

This isn’t to suggest that the work is incapable of producing brilliantly reflective collaborations. Caspar Heinemann’s Narcissus (Hi Saturation), a text produced in response to Scott’s residency at Almanac Inn, Turin, is an erudite, demanding and excellently pitched reconfiguration of Greek myth that reads Scott’s output as an opportunity to think beyond bounded notions of gender – a very welcome supplement to ‘Silks’. More recently, Scott’s own book, Drunk Complexions, published with London-based press Studio Operative and designed by graphics collective Traven T Croves, brought image-removal fluid into direct contact with the lithographic plates used in its printing process in what is effectively a self-negating act of publishing. The resultant object a positively luminous artist’s book charged with a humming vibrancy.

It is always challenging when one’s affection for a body of work becomes a portent, an indication that something may be wrong. Despite the sheer brilliance of these pools, with their tangible, compelling opulence and olfactory appeal, I couldn’t ignore their premonitory quality as an indication of a deadlock of imagination, one in which the crises of biopolitical constitution have come to find themselves instrumentalised as a form of eye-pleasing set dressing. An innocuous trudge through the mire of capital.