Divide: An Astronaut Story

About

He has been creating these often tongue in cheek, commentary paintings since shortly before 2001, with his signature astronaut, and sometimes dinosaurs, appearing in each new vision. In this new body of work, Scott explores the current political climate in the UK, and the idea of a fundamental divide, this skewing of reality, the split between regular people and those in power, the rich and everybody else.

“In my last show at StolenSpace Gallery in London, I created a series of paintings where the astronaut in my work explored a lost or parallel London from the 90's. The show was about London's past, it's present, and about my two decade old love affair with British music and culture from that time. And then, shortly after that show wrapped up, Brexit happened. And so, for my second show at StolenSpace Gallery in London, I couldn't help but think about Brexit. Of course, I'm an American and I'm therefore, at best, extremely ill equipped to make intelligent statements on anything that has been going on in UK politics over the last few years. And so I didn't want to make a show that was literally about Brexit. That's not my story to tell.

But from what I do understand, it feels eerily parallel to larger political and cultural movements that have been dividing people in my country and, simultaneously, in many other places around the world. And the more I thought about it, it was this fundamental divide, the split between regular people and those in power, the rich and everybody else, the political left and right, the old and young, the very skewing of reality and perception between people of different backgrounds – it was those things which I couldn't stop thinking about. It feels like we're all teetering on the edge of a great divide, with a fearful present and future for both sides.

And so I created a series of paintings where each canvas is split in half with a painted line, where two separate worlds appear to be connecting or disconnecting, and I've used the landscape and architecture of modern London as a kind of language between those two worlds. The lone, singular astronaut who appears in each of my paintings explores this fractured place. Sometimes slipping between the two and sometimes stuck in one half, able to see both partitions but unable to make sense of the two halves together.” - Scott Listfield, 2019