SCOTT SIEDMAN

OCEAN VIEWS

Opening June 28th, 2024

5 – 8 PM

Kantor Gallery is pleased to present Ocean Views, an exhibition of works by Scott Siedman. The show will be on view from June 28 – July 26, 2024; opening reception is June 28, 5-8pm.

Born in the Boyle Heights section of East Los Angeles in 1948 – Scott Siedman was a child of the 50’s shaped as an artist by Rembrandt, Magritte, Sid Caeser, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel. The latter coincided with Atomic Bomb fears and his natural interest in the mysterious. After graduating from Cal Arts, he worked as an illustrator for the Washington Post, painted a mural for a UN conference on the environment in Canada and designed sets for theater and film before devoting himself to painting as his primary medium. Ocean Views is his response to the climate crisis, which when he began the series in 2000 as a response to the warnings of things to come. Not one to surrender to despair, Siedman includes humor and some of his favorite art in these apocalyptic settings- undamaged and undiminished in their power to celebrate the best in us.

Scott Siedman: “The art I make is infused with contradiction, ambiguity and odd juxtapositions. These elements are there because of a natural inclination to doubt the ’truths’ of my cultural inheritance and an innate contrariness.

Picasso said that ‘taste is the enemy of art, to which I would add purity, fear and the need to cater to the demands of the marketplace.’ Ocean Views stylistically combines realism and geometric abstraction in a marriage that is held together through dramatic lighting effects and thematically combines bright cheerful color with impending climate change devastation – a style someone called ‘Disney Doomsday’.

The impulse to insert some of my favorite abstract art by Brancusi, Giacometti and David Smith into these settings satisfies a need to create a counterpoint to the realism and add a note of optimism to the doom and gloom – if we can make these profoundly beautiful works of art, then perhaps we can create/invent the solutions we need to survive the seemingly insoluble global messes that we have created. The cat on the keys of a piano adrift in an angry sea plays on…”