Rebecca Scott: Interference

Solo exhibition by Cumbrian born artist Rebecca Scott featuring a series of paintings based on Vogue magazine covers that have been manipulated and ‘interfered’ with.

In the first of these magazines, made in 2015, Scott erased all the text from the pages, using a heavy marker pen. By the third iteration, again using marker pens, she began stripping away the fashion, removing the outfits to create new nude figures. This interference was her reaction to and rebellion against the perfect ideal of beauty, prescribed throughout the pages. These actions were also deliberately puerile; an act of sabotage directed at the sophisticated, highly constructed, and photoshopped image of beauty, promoted by the fashion industry. The root of this work inspired by feminist writing, particularly The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf.

In this exhibition, an original defaced Vogue magazine is on display, alongside a screen that allows the viewer to swipe through its pages. Several of these altered pages became the starting point for the paintings in the Vogue series. A more recent development to these paintings includes the addition of text. It originally began with a scribble; painted across the image, therefore disrupting the viewer’s initial reading of the work. The text varies in subject, using paragraphs drawn from The Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer and more recently based on poetry written by the artist’s late mother. The text disrupts the viewer even more, ensuring that instead of looking past the scribble, they pause to read the painted words – maybe even before viewing what is on the canvas behind.

Thursday to Saturday, 12-5pm, free entry.