“As a large institution the museum is a compound organism. For any artists, I suspect, it is Kafka-esque in quality: it is the castle they must penetrate, the bureaucracy they must learn to manage. Having negotiated the paperwork, they must also take on the history laid out in the galleries: artists often disrupt the linear story that those galleries tend to tell. Their responses to what they see there come from a different perspective than that of the curators, and are no less well informed.”
—Kynaston McShine from The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 23.

In his supersaturated paintings Adam Scott considers the volatile landscape of America, and how through films, news media, and mass-produced images, these places become embedded in our memories. His subjects are often derived from old postcards or movies and then mediated by his own personal remembrances and as he asserts, “his uniquely American sense of paranoia.” Scott uses vibrant colors and viscous paint to produce commanding pictures that, like the originals he appropriates, become “burned in your retina.” The dynamic folds of poured paint intimate a constantly mutating world, one on the verge of consuming itself, while alluding to the slippage between reality and subjective memory.

Scott’s painting Redux (Museum of Contemporary Art on Fire) (2002) depicts the MCA, a site with great significance for this Chicago-based artist, and alludes to The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–68) by Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937). Ruscha’s painting—a sarcastic critique of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s then-new building complex—is a notorious example of an artist addressing the complex and often critical relationship between artists and museums. Scott, a musician as well as an artist, sees his work as an “amped-up cover” of Ruscha’s painting and an homage to an artist whose work greatly influenced his own.

While Ruscha precisely rendered the Los Angeles museum buildings from a bird’s-eye view, Scott made a distorted close-up of the MCA’s front facade. A fire blazes atop the roof while the building and environs appear to melt. Scott’s energetic swirls of paint, the cartoon-like nature of the image, and the artist’s admittedly positive, although cautious, feelings about the MCA complicate the meaning of the image. Does it belong in the realm of catastrophe or metaphor? Equal parts fantasy, homage, portrait, and reflection of the current cultural climate, Scott’s MCA is open to interpretation.

—Staci Boris