Walter Scott
Bad Paleontology

April 20–May 19, 2018
Opening: Friday, April 20th 6–8pm

ESP is pleased to present Bad Paleontology by Walter Scott.

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Formal analogies are a gloomy outline, the skeleton of what you imagine the outside world was doing before trying to love you. Why does everything have to be a vacuum-sealed lizard for you? The past and the present happen all at once, in a bodily reaction, based on what you think you deserve, which is based on what you’ve gotten up to now. Of course you’ll imagine the scaly hate-lizard you do, with the tools you’ve been given. But who says your gut feeling is right? In the realm of paranoia, which is a form of self-preservation, featherless lizards scamper soundlessly across the pages of your own psychoanalysis. Pointing at the moon is not the moon, after all. Imagining a flower blooming alongside a breath is an extension of your obsession with astrology. In the flatness of meditation, which is the ornate side of disassociation, the jam is too pink! So, to lean into the arms of certainty is to embrace the body that’s missing. But at least there, you can fill the space with a history that includes you.

Walter Scott b. 1985, is an interdisciplinary artist working across writing, drawing, performance and sculpture. In 2011, while living in Montréal, he began a comic book series, Wendy, exploring the narrative of a fictional young woman living in an urban centre who aspires to global success and art stardom but whose dreams are perpetually derailed. Contemporary questions of representation, cultural production, popular culture and narrative construction are central to his practice. Wendy has been featured in Canadian Art, Art in America, and published online on the New Yorker. It was selected for the 2016 edition of Best American Comics, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York. Recent exhibitions include Big Toe, Giant Steps at Occidental Temporary, Paris, Ambivalent Pleasures: Vancouver Special, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, and Who Isn’t She? A Wendy Retrospective, at Galerie UQO, in Gatineau. In 2016, Walter was the Artist-In-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

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