The Shock of the Now Issue 13
Featured Exhibition Text
Samara Scott
'BRIM' Solo Exhibition
The Sunday Painter
13th October 2021

Dappled, kaleidoscopic light is cast across The Sunday Painter’s lower gallery, passing through the illuminated lens of Samara Scott’s arrangements of disposable detritus. BRIM, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the Vauxhall-based gallery, sees the space bisected by a dropped ceiling, its monotonous, repetitious grid of tiles punctuated by psychedelic panels resplendent in fluorescent tones. Plastic polybags, printer paper, punched pockets and ballpoint pens are all preserved in pools of lurid liquid, as if a cluttered office drawer has been upturned upon a recent radioactive spillage. The installation, reflective of Scott’s continued critique of rampant consumerism, highlights our ready reliance on non-perishable products, those mass-manufactured items as rapidly produced and purchased as they are used and discarded. Coffee stirrers, cocktail skewers and CD cases mingle with bottle caps, tangled cables and pill packets, forming commemorative tableaus to consumer culture akin to stained glass religious reliquaries.

The true brilliance of the artwork lies in its inherent self-exposure and self-revelation, its topside freely viewable from the upper gallery space and The Sunday Painters’ shopfront facade. Here the amassed collections of objects and artefacts creating such an alluring and almost meditative environment below, are revealed for all that they are, trash. 

Upstairs, clustered compositions of photographs occupy the walls, selected from the artist’s own decade-deep archive of imagery and arranged in collaboration with Scott’s peer Berry Patten. The acts of veiling, concealing, disguising and screening, as well as their uncovering or revealing antonyms, dominate the visual narrative in these gridded collages, the perfect accompaniments to the beguiling, illusory installation they precede.