Art in America May, 2003

Michael Scott at Kagan Martos
Article by Melissa Kuntz

Known for his 2001 series of large-scale portraits of professional athletes constructed entirely of Lego blocks, Michael Scott continued to explore relationships among sports, art and popular culture in his recent solo exhibition. Only Mythos (Mike Tyson) was made of the signature Lego; the rest of the pieces utilized other mass-produced materials in intriguing ways. For example, in an untitled “painting” from 2002, neon-yellow felt was stretched like a canvas, and a vertical silver line was painted down the center, referencing a tennis ball and a Barnett Newman-esque painting at once.

Scott’s unusual choice of materials underpins some of his strongest works, as he brings prefabricated models, miniature trees and green flocking to bear on his sports theme. Sylvan Dreams is a 66-inch circular structure, hung on the wall: a model of a baseball diamond in green flocking is surrounded by a dense mass of fir trees, similar to those used in model train sets. In Par 3 Hole 15 Metro (2002) an elaborate plastic model of an early 20th century New York streetscape becomes an urban golfer’s dream – a course, like an extravagant roof garden, sits atop the adjoining buildings.

In a somewhat didactic work titled Ascension, an image of Michael Jordan dunking a basketball is presented as a Gothic arch-shaped stained-glass panel mounted on a lightbox; reaching for the hoops suggests a quasi-transcendental feat. Scott compares sports stars not only to saints, but also to great artists: the heads of Shaquille O’Neal, Derek Jeter and Tiger Woods sit atop replicas of the lower halves of marble busts labeled Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci.

More subtle in its approach is the sculpture Lap, a model of an Olympic-sized swimming pool juxtaposed with a sandy beach and waves. Made of cast acrylic, the piece hangs on the wall like a painting, but juts out at the bottom so that the viewer sees the work at an unexpected angle. The combination of nature – ocean waves and sand – with the man-made gridded pool is esthetically and conceptually more complex than some of the other sports-themed works.
The artistic exploration of North America’s obsession with sports seems a quirky project, somehow doomed to fail. Yet Scott’s ingenuity with materials, his thoughtful presentation and meticulous craftsmanship give these pieces an integrity that deserves a second, more thoughtful look.




Copyright © 2003, Michael Scott