Samara Scott, “The Doldrums”

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2011, Scott has been developing an artistic practice that feeds on the context of hyper-consumerism to create visually seductive installations composed of manufactured objects and organic or chemical by-products of mass production. At the CAPC she has suspended an opaque net in the central nave of the museum that divides the space horizontally, forming a 1,000 sqm canopy at mezzanine level that overlooks the large piazza beneath. On this plane surface, she has arranged a vast ‘pictorial’ composition, a kind of gigantic matiériste painting made from plastics, textiles, fluids and various kinds of substances that the human body ingests or digests, or in which it is covered or coated for nourishment, purification, embellishment, protection or even destruction.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the naval vocabulary, where it denotes an equatorial region with calms and unpredictable winds, where sailboats can get stuck for hours or even days. In the figurative sense, the expression refers to a slump, a period of inactivity, a sense of entanglement in an inextricable situation or the feeling of treading water (the term is also used in economics to indicate a recession).

Scott’s installation can be experienced both from above and from below, offering visitors two very different perspectives on the same work. From underneath, it has the appearance of a smooth, digital image. The view from the mezzanines, however, lets exhibition-goers discover the discarded objects that make up this wrecked landscape evocative of the twenty-first century, and grasp the full extent of its ‘toxic positivity’.

Events Programme
Samara Scott’s aerial installation offers a floor area at the scale of the nave that the artist sees as a space for sharing and conviviality. A series of events, designed and produced in collaboration with the artist, will be hosted during the duration of the CAPC exhibition: Catwalk, with a runway show of her fashion label, Dirty Weekend with the Dirty Art Foundation of Amsterdam in collaboration with the EBABX – École supérieure des Beaux-Arts de BordeauX and a Giant Yoga.

Within the framework of the exhibition, CAPC has also given Samara Scott carte blanche to curate a programme of screenings of videos and films by various artists whose work she feels echoes her own. The screenings will take place in the Galerie Arnozan on the second floor of the museum renamed Cosa mentale.

Publication
Samara Scott’s exhibition will see the publication of a catalogue, as part of the series of books that the CAPC has devoted since 2017 to the nave’s site-specific projects. The publication brings together various perspectives on the installation and an interview with the artist conducted by the curator of the exhibition, Alice Motard.

Samara Scott (b. 1985 in London) lives and works in Dover and Barcelona. After completing a Bachelor’s degree at Camberwell College of Art in 2008, she graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2011. Selected solo shows include Belt and Road, Tramway, Glasgow (2018); Jacobs Creek, The Sunday Painter, Offsite / Four Six One Nine, Los Angeles; Developer, Pumphouse & Battersea Park, London (both 2016); Silks, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2015). Selected group shows include The Happy Fact, La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Day Tripper, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (both 2019); Voyage, Bergamin & Gomide, São Paulo (2017–8); Days are Dogs, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Entangled, Turner Contemporary, Margate (both 2017); I am a Painting, Kumu Museum, Tallinn (2014).
She is represented by The Sunday Painter, London.

Curator: Alice Motard

With the support of Fluxus Art Projects, a Franco-British programme for contemporary art supported by the French Ministry of Culture, the Institut français and the British Council.