Scott Young – Cubicle
Welcome Scott Young’s Cubicle, a window into a window, a portal into a dream…
Cubicle, Scott Young, 2025 on view at Shoreditch Arts Club
Scott Young's work explores how images and objects absorb and hold significance in strange and uncanny ways, dependent on context and lived experience. Central to his practice is the tension between dichotomies; imitation vs. reality, image vs. object, tradition vs. technology, reflecting the growing complexity and atomisation of modern life.
The work curiously depicts two different horizons of the Pacific Northwest coastline, memories of Young’s hometown, the expansive sceneries captured in still life through the window pane of delicately painted wood surrounded by marble surfaces, credited to the artist’s trompe l’oeil training at Van der Kelen Logelain in Brussels, the only school in the world to teach this traditional techniques of decorative painting.
Focusing on how cultural references move between personal sites of transformation and the alienating effects of mass media, his paintings reimagine still life and vanitas through a variety of contemporary lenses. Embedding objects and motifs with complex social significance he re-codes the status of materials and their social and financial values using techniques including trompe l’oeil.
Young is fascinated by how technology has been domesticated since the advent of network television, particularly interested in the role of furniture in transforming media into familiar, household objects. This theme is present in much of his work, where the tension between image and object recalls a modernist impulse to simultaneously blur boundaries yet systematically organise life into order. In the case of Cubicle, the red armchair, ambiguously unplugged microphone, a glimpse of an old television set, all work together to evoke this dichotomy. Through subtle alterations, careful positioning of cultural references and a visual hacking of references, Young’s work questions categorisation and explores how digital technologies reinforce these distinctions in an increasingly polarised world.
Images and words courtesy of TINA.
B. 1988, Seattle, WA, USA; lives and works in London, UK.
Scott Young’s recent solo exhibitions include Scrapbook, Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Decoy, Duarte Sequeira, Seoul (2024); Storage Solutions, V.O Curations, London (2023); and Home Wrecker (Citrus of Sadness), Des Bains, London (2022). Group exhibitions include Agritourism, Gunia Nowik Gallery, Warsaw (2024); Sin Centre, Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2024); Office, Duarte Seueira, London (2024); The Unlimited Dream Company 2, Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2023); The World is Wholly Inside, and I am Wholly Outside Myself, Galerie Mitterrand, Paris (2023); Inside/Outside, The Artists Room, London (2022); Ghost Show, Hartlslane Gallery, London (2022); Smokey, Merle & Friends, 310 New Cross, London (2021); Underpinned by the Movements of Freighters, Florence Trust, London (2021); Size Matters, Propositions Studios, London (2021); Arcade/Arcade, AMP Gallery, London (2021); Access, Deptford, London (2021); and For The Love of Avocados, Art Exchange, University of Essex Gallery, Colchester (2020).
