The Weight of What We Carry (part three)
There is a moment, after learning how Scott creates his work, when the process falls away and something quieter rises to the surface. The work begins to feel less like a collection of pieces and more like a practice of living. A way of making room. A way of letting go. A way of allowing what is no longer needed to fall away so something else can enter.
The modest fragments seem to hold a private kind of weight and draw you in without insisting. They ask you to move slowly. They feel like the parts of a life that normally go unspoken, yet somehow hold the center of the story.
Knowing the contours of Scott’s history created a softer space around all of this. It asked me to slow down and notice the interior rhythm of his practice. Each page feels like a clearing-out, a small act of unburdening that happens one day at a time. Not in dramatic sweeps, but in steady, human increments. He sets down what he has carried, and in doing so, he opens a little more space for whatever might be next. There is lightness in that. There is care in that. And there is a kind of courage in refusing to hold what no longer feeds him.
What continues to move me is his openness to the possibility that every story has another side. When he turns the image over, when he looks at the negative form of what he has released, it is not a technical step. It is an act of curiosity. A question. A willingness to see familiar feelings rearranged into something unexpected. The finished work holds that sense of discovery. It feels like a reminder that even the heaviness we carry contains more than one truth.
There is a sense of recognition looking at the work. Not a specific memory, but the familiar experience of sorting through a day or trying to understand something that once felt too large to hold. The images carry both energy and stillness. They open rather than close. They offer a gentle suggestion that meaning is not fixed or final. It shifts. It reshapes itself. It reveals different truths depending on where you stand and what you bring with you.
What is most striking is how naturally this all unfolds. The analog pages hold the immediate weight of a life being lived. The inverted works reveal the possibility that rises after release. Both are necessary. Both are true. The spirit of the work rests in the space between them, in the balance of letting go and looking again, of setting something down and remaining open to what might appear on the other side.
This exhibition is Scott’s first full showing of his work, and yet it feels like the beginning of a much longer conversation. He is already discovering new ways to respond to the inverted images, layering paint and oil stick and new gestures as if following a thread into the next chapter of his own story. The work is still becoming. Still unfolding.
The Weight of Small Things is not a conclusion.
It is an invitation.
A way of witnessing how one person moves through the world by releasing what he cannot keep and making space for what he does not yet know.
A quiet map of what it means to lighten the self so something new can enter.
Meet Scott and see his work at the Opening Reception for “The Weight of Small Things” Friday, December 19th 5:30-8:00
**More about the Exhibit and Reception coming soon.