StolenSpace Gallery is pleased to welcome back Scott Listfield for his provoking new solo exhibition ‘The Equinox’. Scott has been creating these often tongue in cheek, commentary paintings since shortly before 2001, with his signature astronaut appearing completely out of context within each new vision, thus giving the viewer a fresh window looking in to these often lone landscapes imbued with modern age iconography and symbolism.
In this new body of work, Scott explores a personal journey where he set out with his brother, to visit places in Latvia and Lithuania where their family’s ancestors once lived.
“On our arrival in Vilnius, where by total chance we stumbled onto a large burning wolf. It was a celebration of the fall equinox and the 700th anniversary of the founding of the city, although we didn't know that at the time. We were just walking along the river at sunset, when increasingly large crowds began to appear around us, until it was obvious that there was a gathering of some kind. That's when we saw the wolf. It spoke loudly, in Lithuanian. I don't speak Lithuanian, but that didn't totally matter in the moment. There were people with fire dancing around it and, as the night went on, eventually the wolf was engulfed in flames and smoke and ash poured out across the river and fell onto our faces. It was hard not to feel like I had just witnessed something which stretched back along my roots in these countries to something very primeval.”
‘The Equinox’ features places along Listfield’s trip. It's a story about that journey, and about his trip backwards through time to try and connect with his ancestry. And about encounters with a wolf, who appears in one form or another in all of these paintings. Sometimes as a companion to the astronaut, sometimes as a statue or a relic or a mural or a ghost or a metaphor.