| A major trajectory of Scott Rogers’ recent work is the critical examination of networks and systems. This is not to tout the failure of technological design and scientific ingenuity, but to affirm the interconnectivity between the organic and synthetic, internal and external, ordered and chaotic or Apollinian and Dionysian. In a broad sense Scott’s intention is to establish flows between systems without hierarchical or totalizing movements, but as constant de-structuring and re-structuring. This process takes the form of complex, ephemeral installations. The assemblage of these installations can be considered a type of ecosystem, where all of the constituent parts are in perpetual flux through their relation to one another and to exterior and interior forces. Included in the ecosystem are numerous references to organisms such as plants and animals, geography and climate, architecture, suburbia, transportation, economics, pop culture and forms of graphing and mapping. Materially, Scott’s work is considered with an intuitive simplicity. Minimalism being the initiation point, but a folded or crumpled minimalism, its sacred forms converted into basement knock-offs. Cardboard, found and discarded objects, tape, glue and scissors, pencils and basic papers are the tools of choice in this “bootlegging” process. These materials are chosen both for their ease of use and application, and for their immediate effortlessness. Likewise, Scott’s process reflects an off-hand or disposable look, crossing between wonky proportionate reconstructions, rapidly created sculptures and imagined whimsical drawings. This economical approach situates Scott’s work as part of a banal aesthetic, perhaps making the banal so overwhelming that it becomes superfluous, even baroque. Simultaneously, the banal serves as an alternative to transcendence favouring immanence and equality. This equality focuses meaning outside of transcendent experience, and instead locates it in the metamorphosis between opposing forms and materials, and the eventual blurring of differences. It might be said that Scott’s work approaches a tentative unity then, despite its traversals of diversely crappy ephemera. Both formally and conceptually buildings, people and plants (or steel and cardboard for that matter) evolve into parts of a heterogeneous metamorphosing substance. A non-linear collection, where the organic and the synthetic become resemblances of each other, neither reducible to mathematics nor biology, but endlessly coding and decoding. In the context of varying installations, this metamorphosis finds a relevant edge. The conflation of form and content (buildings are boxes, fish are a floorplan etc.) disturbs the order or levels of accepted classification. A co-dependence or hybridity between elements suggests that even the largest building (or corporation) relies on a complex network of interactions, both natural and human created to develop its form. Scott’s work then refers to an inclusive openness, a creation of space, or a speculative environment which undermines false utopias, inflexible corporate structure and architectural rigidity. |