John Scott

Raw, personal and political, John Scott: Firestorm; presents an artist's searing critique of modernitys capacity for industrial warfare and the machines that enable it. Scott produced paintings, drawings, and sculptures of what he called engines of history, the hyper-masculine military and civilian weapons of the past half century. Surveillance aircraft, B-52 and stealth bombers, tanks, cruise missiles and rockets, as well as handguns, muscle cars, and motorcycles forcefully imprint themselves upon the viewer through Scotts fierce mark-making and large, rough sculptural gestures. Humanoid rabbits often surrounded by numbers that fail to add uprepresent those threatened by such technologies. The dichotomy between the death-dealing weaponry of the nuclear era and the vulnerability of human beings lies at the core of Scotts work. Scott (19492022) deployed an idiosyncratic graphic language to represent apocalyptic machines and the imbalances of power, working in the tradition of Francisco Goya, Kthe Kollwitz, Nancy Spero, and others. Scott grew up in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit, Michigan. Like many Canadian artists, writers, and intellectuals of his time, Scott was a close watcher of America, with a front-row seat on a sometimes rogue nation. Stylistically, his work is close to that of his contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and William Kentridge, showing a kindred ferocity of mark making and dark urgency. John Scott: Firestorm accompanies the exhibition of the same name organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, curated by esteemed Canadian art scholar John OBrian. It is the first major exhibition of Scotts work to focus on his imagery of machines and on modernitys capacity for industrial wara body of work as meaningful today as it was when it first appeared in the 1970s. This publications features more than 100 of Scotts works, a detailed biography, and new critical writings on the artist.