The paintings of Scott Miles present him as an artist who is not distanced from society. They express a heightened awareness of society and its technologies, modes of communication, lifestyles and imageries. For his upcoming exhibition, The Problem of a Colour Wheel, Scott returns to the colour wheel to capture an endlessly complex and always changeable network of realities and collective memory. Although colour wheels are devised to provide a complete representation of colour, till today there has yet to be one that is able to encompass the totality of colour in our world. The human need to classify everything proves problematic again with something as limitless as colour – there will always be something left behind.
Like the fate of the colour wheel, there is also a deep sense that something is being left out or paled in order to privilege other aspects in Scott’s paintings. Scenes based on personal experiences and sociopolitical events are decontextualized and transferred into an ordered sequence of color, a strategy that allows for colour to re-shape meaning and accentuate an absence, a presence, a clash or harmony. In the presence of the work, the viewer understands certain things intuitively and immediately. By aligning his images according to a mapped colour sequence, he re-contextualizes and even manipulates moments in time to reveal unexamined perspectives.
The sense of Scott’s participation in society also manages by some alchemy to evoke an equally strong feeling of resistance, contradiction and detachment. His latest body of work is not so much records of personal experience as they are a reflection on the human condition in the contemporary world. It is an uncanny reality that Scott’s paintings expose as the other side of the images’ visual appeal.
The Problem of a Colour Wheel opens 7 July at Fehily Contemporary and will run through to 30 July.
