Toby Webster, Glasgow
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Scottish • 1975
Scott Myles is a Scottish artist based in Glasgow, UK. His practice is strongly gestural and consists of sculpture, painting, printmaking, artist’s books, photography and performance-based projects: a kind of reactivation of ideas relating to the value of art and social reality by means of reusing already established codes. Early works explored circulation, exchange and value. For example, in an extended performance in 1999, Myles intervened into corporate culture by using a number of newspaper kiosks as lending libraries. He 'took out' publications from a chain store, replacing them at different locations of the same retailer, without leading to any commercial loss for the respective chain. Since 2008, in the wake of the global recession, Myles has produced a number of projects and sculptures wherein he allegorizes symbols which have become ruins. These have ranged from large-scale sculptural works to dematerialized artworks within site-specific locations such as galleries, department stores and the outdoors. Additionally, Myles has appropriated and adapted works by other artists, exploring gift-exchange while continually deviating from the original reference point in a way that not only reflects the original idea but is also an authentic presentation of something else, something personal. As a whole, his artworks constitute a complex network of responses to social and physical infrastructures, and examine the subject in their own environment. Myles’s most recent body of work is a series of paintings thematizing a pictorial device which is at once a partial reiteration of the canvas stretcher frame, an illusionistic suggestion of the picture as a perspectival window, and a sinister intimation of the gibbet or gallows.
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