Remai Modern to host first solo museum show by Walter Scott
Saskatoon, Canada — Remai Modern is thrilled to present the first solo museum exhibition of Walter Scott. Titled Betazoid in a Fog, the exhibition opens on August 10 and runs through October 21 in the Connect Gallery. This presentation of Scott’s work speaks to Remai Modern’s ambition to support emerging artists at pivotal moments in their careers. Programming in the ground floor gallery connects new voices and new ideas with new audiences, thanks to the generosity of TD.
Scott works in a variety of media to explore social and emotional worlds. His practice includes drawing, sculpture, video, performance, and his critically acclaimed Wendy comic strip and graphic novels. Contemporary questions of representation and narrative construction are central to his work.
Curated by Rose Bouthillier, Curator (Exhibitions) at Remai Modern, Betazoid in a Fog features an installation of Scott’s new and recent sculptures. The exhibition is filled with traces of the body: pieces of clothing, locks of hair, cast limbs and skeletal frames. Exploring disembodiment and empathy, the works move between flat and full forms, feelings and modes of thought. They evoke the anxiety, duality and vulnerability that shape individual experience, while also creating space for new encounters and openness towards the unseen and unknown.
“Walter Scott’s work deftly speaks to the complexities of human experience, with a sardonic sense of humour and style,” said Gregory Burke, Remai Modern’s Executive Director & CEO. “This will be Scott’s largest solo presentation to date, and we are delighted that our audience will be the first to experience his newest work.”
Scott will return to Remai Modern on Friday, September 7 for a live performance as part of the museum’s monthly Turn Out series. Based on his Wendy comic strip, the performance includes never-before-seen illustrations from his next book, and offers a humorous and self-effacing perspective on the graduate school experience. Scott earned an MFA from the University of Guelph in 2018, and he often draws on his own experience for Wendy. A conversation with Bouthillier will follow. On Tuesday, September 11, the first of Scott’s book-length Wendy graphic novels will be the subject of the museum’s ongoing Artful Readings discussion group.
“Walter Scott has a unique ability to move across different modes of expression. Yet all of his work shares a distinctive energy, a way of nimbly capturing the messy, absurd and personal,” said Bouthillier. “His work in sculpture has really expanded in the past few years, so this exhibition comes at an exciting moment. Scott is designing the entire installation, and the show unfolds as a series of encounters with unruly personas, feelings and states—there is a lot to wrestle with.”
Remai Modern’s presentation of Scott’s work is part of the TD Connect Program. TD’s gift of $400,000 supports programming for five years in the free ground floor Connect Gallery.
About Walter Scott
Walter Scott (b. 1985) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes writing, video, performance and sculpture. In 2011, while living in Montréal, he created Wendy, a comic book series about a fictional young woman living in an urban centre who aspires to global success and art stardom but whose dreams are perpetually derailed. Wendy has been featured in Canadian Art and Art in America, and was published online by The New Yorker. The comic was selected for the 2016 edition of Best American Comics, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York.
Recent presentations of Scott’s work include the group exhibitions Big Toe, Giant Steps (2016), Occidental Temporary, Paris, and Ambivalent Pleasures: Vancouver Special (2016), Vancouver Art Gallery; and the solo exhibition Who Isn’t She? A Wendy Retrospective (2017), Galerie UQO, Gatineau. In 2016, Scott was Artist-In-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2017, Scott collaborated with Tanya Lukin Linklater, Duane Linklater, and cheyanne turions on the year-long project Wood Land School: Kahatènhston tsi na’tetiátere ne Iotohrkó:wa tánon Iotohrha / Drawing a Line from January to December, at the SBC Gallery in Montreal.
About Remai Modern
Remai Modern is a new museum of modern and contemporary art in Saskatoon. It aims to be a vibrant, imaginative and prescient museum committed to affirming the powerful role that art and artists play in questioning, interpreting and defining the modern era. Remai Modern is home to the world’s foremost collection of Picasso linocut prints, and aspires to be a leading centre for contemporary Indigenous art programming.
For additional information contact:
Stephanie McKay, Communications Manager
306.975.2242
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Remai Modern is situated on Treaty 6 Territory and the Traditional Homeland of the Métis. We pay our respects to First Nations and Métis ancestors and reaffirm our relationship with one another.
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