Scott Short:
Beyond the Mundane
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Partly because Short has devised such an extreme method, the results are both fascinating and intentionally frustrating. Untitled (Black) offers an even pattern of what look like elongated cell shapes, yet it’s certainly not organic in feel. Untitled (Red) is much denser at the upper left than in the rest of the painting, but that variation seems to have no emotional or other implications. In both paintings the eye seeks out familiar forms and, failing to find them, winds up wandering amid staticlike patterns, patterns that push one to the brink of annoyance. But it’s annoyance with a purpose: Short’s resolute pursuit of seemingly endless meaningless patterns, trapping us in the random details and defects of the photocopying mechanism, leaves the viewer adrift and in a curious way more open than before.
In his statement Short says, “I engineer a situation to fail. I ask a machine…with no opinions, no sensitivity, no intentionality, no capacity for poetry” to render colors in black and white. Yet the exhibit is not without humor, starting with the ironic title. Two paintings hung side by side, Untitled (Green) and Untitled (Brown), are almost identical, suggesting that the original color has no effect on Short’s results. And the largest piece in the show, Untitled (Blue), is actually two canvases, the left panel larger than the right. Diptychs traditionally show different images– the duke’s wife next to the duke–but here we just get more of the same interminable pattern.
This connectedness is even more explicit in Still Life: Incarnation. Here Scarlato created a black-and-white drawing (an imitation of the style he used in grad school) to echo the forms of some of the objects on the table below, which include a stuffed duck, some Elmer’s glue, and a twisted bit of an automobile fender that offers a distorted reflection of the items in front of it. Scarlato carefully offers three different versions–the abstracted drawing, the fender reflection, and the painting itself–of the same mundane objects; no representation is more compelling, or more “real,” than any other.
