Scott endsley: Cracking the Ordinary

Scott Endsley's work pulsates with a vitality which emanates from the tension between coiled patterns and blocks of layered pigment.

Recognizable forms half-cohere into macrostructures, but are prevented from solidifying; instead they remain trapped in living stasis- tableau less pictoral than diagrammatic, cartographic. Echoes of the whorls of the human brain compete with mapped cityscapes- New York as a construction at once mental and concrete, stretched across physical dimensions in birds-eye street layouts, stretched across psychic dimensions in the patterned textures which compete with the regularity of infrastructural grids.

Temporal dimensions are seeded into the pictures as well, through an obsession with news media- scraps of text and recollected images compiling and refracting current events spanning years and setting networks of associations spinning through the scene. The city is constructed as the epicenter of the world, and world events are mediated through it to be fed into the overarching cognition-in-contrast; the passage of time enters the landscape fitfully, the observer united so closely with the entity of the city that turning years cannot be marked by changes to the landscape- which are bodily, gradual, and subducted beneath notice-but must be found in the little narratives of the outside world which echo through the city without settling into place.

This pseudo-conscious amalgam of city, individual, and narrative manifests in Endsley's sculptural work as well; antenna towers rise in gridlike rigidity from solid foundations, but intricacy of texture disrupts the potential for clarity of silhouette, and culturally-potent iconography chases each structure across spans of time; a golden dollhouse is filled with seashells, protective nests of patterned whorls sheltering votive images of children lost to imperialist bombs. In every work the interplay is sustained, the inch-by-inch flow from city, to citizen, to society and back again, without lapsing into synthesis or resolving into seamless unity.

Each strand of the fabric of urban life is separated, is held apart- though vibrating, slipping, straining to be brought together once more.