Scott Stack: Night Vision

Scott Stack’s meticulously rendered paintings are both process and content driven. His monochrome paintings are made line-by-line as if seeing the world through night vision goggles.  We are all too familiar (thanks CNN) with televised night vision imagery, and Stack considers carefully the images he chooses. Pictures of airplanes and the crash site of Lady Di may not seem out of place in their implied destruction. However, when the lens is turned to cool Bauhaus architecture, the Buckingham Fountain, and even a snowman one begins to question this reality.

“I wanted to create a painting that used a technology that referenced covert seeing. A form that made seeing the image illicit and I wanted to make a painting with only one color, not in the minimalist or color field tradition but a painting that defaulted to its construction in spite of being painted. I have continued to keep my work experimental by allowing new processes into my vocabulary and painting what interests me. This process exists in the world by virtue of information designed, produced and disseminated through different media, as a painter I am interested in both the recognizable quality of the technology and the possibility of constructing an image that can only exist as a painting.”  Scott Stack 2006

Scott Stack  (born 1952, lives in Oak Park, Illinois) received his painting degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1976. He has had solo exhibitions at White Columns NY, Chicago Cultural Center, and Thomas Barry Fine Arts in Minneapolis. Group exhibitions include the Drawing Center NY, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Hyde Park Art Center Chicago, and most recently at the Gahlberg Gallery. Stack has been the recipient an Illinois State Arts Board Grant, Ragdale Artist Residency, McNight Foundation Fellowship, and Jerome Foundation Fellowship. This is his first solo show since 1997.