COUNTERSITES

Ryan Renshaw Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of Scott Miles.  The artist’s paintings are painstakingly rendered, taking months of periodic working and reworking of the paint.   City skylines, rooftops and abandoned buildings from unrelated architectural time zones mingle and merge.  

Scott Miles is a Melbourne-based artist working primarily in the genre of painting. Employing a traditional painterly aesthetic Miles’ works are dramatically contemporary. Depicting seemingly mundane landscapes, his paintings are concerned with the displacement of time and history. Decrepit, decaying buildings from a time forgotten are defaced with graffiti or littered with satellite dishes bringing with this an uneasy collision of time and place. Images are imbued with subtle signifiers that play upon the act of observing, remembering and reconstructing.

In his new exhibition at the Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Miles explores his interest in the distillation of time and in the possibilities emerging from unknown situations. Often his imagery depicts vacated spaces that are devoid of the activities that would once have defined their purpose, and the viewer is prompted to re-construct this history as they view the painting.  Scott Miles skillfully plays with ‘what is’ and (more importantly) ‘what is not’ present in the frame to both keep the interpretations of the works fluid, and to allow the narrative to exist inside the viewer’s mind, rather than on the canvas.

Scott’s paintings have been exhibited at various institutions and galleries throughout Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.  He was recently shortlisted for the Fletcher Jones Art Prize in Geelong, Victoria. Scott’s work has been featured in various publications and he has been recognized with several awards and grants, such as the third prize in the Linden Postcard Show in St. Kilda, Victoria, earlier this year.