Scott Treleaven, My dear, my darling, do you hear me where you sleep?: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL, 60607
Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present Canadian artist and filmmaker Scott Treleaven’s largest solo exhibition to date taking over three exhibition spaces. Borrowing his title from the final lines of Elizabeth Smart’s tragically romantic masterpiece, ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’, Scott Treleaven continues his exploration of contemporary mythology, subcultures and longing, in a show that encompasses photography, installation, collage and film.
Treleaven’s new series of collages combines dense watercolor, chiyogami floral motifs and photocopies of figures from his original photographs as well as from movies and magazines. His solitary tableaus of suffering and ecstasy portray his fringe subjects from various underground subcultures involved in dark ritualistic behavior. Flowers, skulls, initiation, absolution and allusions of violence, sex and the occult inhabit Treleaven’s images.
The five shadowy black and white photographic portraits that at first seem to counterpoint the lushness of the collages instead create even more complex relationships between viewer and subject, desire and secrecy, recalling the “intimate regard in which photographers like Nan Goldin hold their subjects.” (Artforum, May 2006).
Three new short films, shot in gorgeously saturated super8 and digital video, further flesh out Treleaven’s romantic, if at times unsettling, world. Silver, shows a magician (AA Bronson) briefly invoking a beautiful spirit and in Gold two figures (Genesis & Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge) ascend a staircase, awash in alchemical imagery, as the staircase twists around itself like a DNA strand. Lustre follows punks through the back alleys of Zurich as they enact a ritual that’s both tender and disturbing. Evoking luminaries like Jarman, Anger, and Genet, the films serve to extend the language of portraiture Treleaven has been developing in his photographs and collages.
Perhaps the heart of the exhibition is an installation of 30 haunting images printed from single frames of super8 film. A boy in a scorched room eats a handful of cherries while the cherry tree itself punctuates the static pictures with bursts of energy. Much like his affection for photocopies, Treleaven raises super8 to a noble stature; the delicate scale of the film itself is mirrored in the 6x5” prints yielding fleeting glimpses of sensuality, youthfulness, pride and contemplation in a stunning exploration of “sympathetic magic”.
Scott Treleaven was born in Toronto, Canada and graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design in 1996. He has recently had successful solo exhibitions at John Connelly Presents, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, as well as a number of group shows throughout the US, including ‘Log Cabin’ at Artists Space, NY. In early 2006 Printed Matter Inc. published a limited edition book containing Treleaven’s early collages, zines and writings entitled The Salivation Army Black Book. Closely tied to his early zine work, Treleaven’s film The Salivation Army (2002) caught the attention of the Village Voice in 2003, screening worldwide, most notably in the official Art Basel film program in 2004 and at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006. Based on his experiences publishing his densely collaged punk/occult zine of the same name, the film fleshed out the artist’s core obsessions: a dark, anthropological current uniting a number of contemporary youth subcultures; latter-day punks and mystics portrayed in his photographs and films as an obsolete (or simply sleeping) aristocratic class; and occult and symbolist language as the most accurate way of describing, and dignifying, the human condition.
