Scott MacLeod

Artist Statement:

I experiment with non-traditional materials such as iodine, mercurochrome, cement, spar varnish, Liquid Paper and paper dartboards, in order to make situations and relationships in which found material can “be itself” without the constraints of expectation, judgment or convention.

I subvert my own expectations, learned behaviors, skills and opinions by recklessly and spontaneously combining materials to create unexpected results over which I have only partial control.

The end results of my experiments are usually paintings, sculptures, collages or installations. For me, the most successful works resist visual and cognitive resolution, to hover between representation and abstraction, referring to both while capitulating to neither.

Writer and artist Scott MacLeod has been presenting live, time-based, media, conceptual and static work in the San Francisco Bay Area and internationally since 1979. His installations and paintings have been widely exhibited in the Bay Area, and internationally in the Czech Republic, Belgium, England, Italy and Germany. Visual arts awards include the San Francisco Art Institute’s Adaline Kent Award (2000) and a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Visual Arts Award (2001).

His fiction, poetry, theater and critical writings have been widely published in the USA and, in translation, in Russia, Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic. Conceptual/literary projects include The Imagined Gallery, The North Oakland Temporary Museum and The Institute for Study & Application, Kohoutenberg. 

He has presented over 100 performances in 13 countries and co-produced several international cultural exchange projects between USA, France, Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. In 1990 MacLeod was one of the first American artists to present performance art in East Germany, Poland and other Eastern European countries.
 
His work is archived at the Avant Writing Collection of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Ohio State University, Columbus and the Experimental Writing Collection of University at Buffalo, New York, and is collected by The Contemporary Museum, Hawai’I, The Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, and many private collectors.