Arrangements

Scott VanderVoort presents Arrangements, a presentation of paintings and sculptures, at Art Cake in Brooklyn, New York on April 9th - 13th, 2022.

“From a young age, I struggled with reading, writing, spelling, and grammar. My eyes avoided such situations as often as they could. Body language, hand gestures, facial expressionas, and movement became my tools to communicate out of necessity. I built a way to connect to others and to the world around me. At the same time, nature and the world outside were my schoolhouse, touching holding, and smelling all the elements in every season. Earth, sticks, rocks, pinecones, and plants were new ingredients for my hands. Stacking, cracking, twisting, and cutting materials helped me to construct shelters and forts with nature’s building materials.

The paintings and sculptures installed at Art Cake are the results of a similar ambition in arriving at a language to connect and communicate with others. The use of shapes and compositions are built to be read as symbolic messaging positioned in a misleading way to influence the viewer into a deeper discovery or connection to the work. Positive and negative space is used to hold the viewer in an isolated moment, like pausing a moment in a film or holding a static frame. Embedding the idea that these selections are part of a bigger whole. The symbolic ingredients I use are the only elements I allow myself to reconfigure. The use of abstraction and simple geometry helps the viewer access their own memory response to the work thereby grounding the work and guiding outcomes that are specific to me and my language. My place of opportunity comes from exploring the unseen or unpredictable. I favor shifting scale and establishing a visual balance in the characters to achieve my unique works.

My chosen final works in both sculpture and painting reach a point I like to call my ‘sweet spots’ like that satisfaction of fitting a puzzle piece where it belongs.

It is in these moments that my ‘arrangements’ come to life. “ – Scott VanderVoort