Among the Ruins

Hope in the Post-Industrial Autumn

Among the Ruins

Civilizations, like the cycle of life and death; grow, flourish, mature and decay. This is as true for every being as it is for entire cultures.

Baptism

Among the Ruins is an unflinching meditation upon the plight of the nuclear family in a post-industrial world. Equally disturbing and emotively driven, these works seem to breath vision into the eloquent and sightless verbal wasteland of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

In this body of work, Miller reflects upon the ruins of a concrete empire, following the collapse of the machinery of State. Stunning in scope, his mechanized wilderness is populated by effigies who draw their only nourishment from their love of each other. The new hope embodied by their children is emphasized in a conceptual contraposto, silhouetted against the corpse of the urban jungle.

Somewhere over the Rainbow

Yet, as the darkest day of winter is also the beginning of the sun's return, these families are the first to begin rebuilding their society and sewing the seeds of bright and distant future.

In an era, entombed by the collapsed modern-industrial complex of the twentieth century, not unlike the collapse of Classical Europe after WWI, we can reflect upon what has passed, while envisioning the ground plowed before us, fertile and receptive to germinate a new way of life.

Read as a whole, this body of work tells a compelling narrative of renewal, rebirth, regeneration - in which the best natures of man, and the natural world might return to harmony and balance... but ultimately, the end of this story is left up to the viewer.

-by Richard T Scott

Among the Ruins    Nov 10th, 2012     Copro Gallery

Bergamot Arts Complex, 2525 Michigan Ave T5, Santa Monica

End of the Road

The Lookout

The Lotus Eater

Oasis

Feast: The first worldwide viral Arts exhibition

For more information, visit:
www.feastpaintings.com

The Metamorphosis Project

The Finest in Contemporary Realism: The Metamorphosis Project Debuts in North Carolina at the Kinston Arts Center with an exhibition and workshops with student of Odd Nerdrum, Richard T Scott.

Kinston, North Carolina, May 21, 2009- August 8th, 2009 - Four of the country's finest contemporary realist artists show recent works at the Kinston Arts Center. The Metamorphosis Project is the four-man collaboration between Richard T. Scott (New York), Adam Miller(New York), Jonathan Matthews (Alabama), and Charles Philip Brooks (North Carolina). The four artists exhibit together on an ongoing basis with the aim of raising awareness of the relevance of naturalistic, skillful, and/or beautiful art in the contemporary art world.

Proposal

We believe that the future of art lies in exchanging collective ideas in a poetic language that speaks to both the artistically esoteric and the uninitiated. We feel that the challenge facing artists today is to communicate in a contemporary language to a larger audience, which transcends the current dialogue: to bridge the gap that separates the academic from the popular. We think that the fundamental communicative nature of visual art lies in the tension between the emotive and articulate, the beautiful and sublime, the narrative and iconic, both clarity and subtlety. This new artistic language involves integrating all of these elements in surprising and innovative ways, but does not rely on surprise or innovation as its primary content. We draw inspiration from all of the past, but also claim our independence to represent the world we see through our own subjective vision. Steering a course between these dichotomies is difficult, if not nearly impossible, but this is the nature of aspiring to create a masterpiece.

Above all we emphasize the relevance and necessity of technical skill, and indeed beauty, in the realm of contemporary art. We think that a great work of art requires three fundamental elements: intelligence, passion, and skill. Rather than negating meaning through deconstructive philosophy, and rather than presenting cold, purely intellectual art, we hope to present an alternative body of work which combines intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic content in a way that seduces and speaks to the viewer. We feel that post-modern philosophy tends to disconnect from the viewer because post-modern artists attempt to communicate verbal ideas through a visual medium. We choose to communicate visual ideas through a visual medium, and verbal ideas through a verbal medium. This is not to say that verbal ideas cannot be communicated, but that they must be filtered and reconstructed to be intelligible, which requires a technical knowledge of one’s medium.

Building on our belief that deconstruction is a process and not a philosophical conclusion; we propose to appeal to the emotions, to the spirit, to the body, as well as the mind. Thus we have chosen the theme of Reconstruction: to rebuild meaning, utilizing the technical mastery passed down to us by the Old Masters and the ideas and analytical tools passed on to us by all eras.

The Metamorphosis Project catalogue is now available!

Steven Assael