A Perfect Storm

The Cincinnati Arts Association’s Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts premieres three new exhibitions: A Perfect Storm, a contemplative and provocative site-specific installation by Andrew Scott; Looking in a Distance, a new series of lyrical and lush abstracted landscape paintings by renowned painter Beverly Erschell; and Add-ons, an inventive new series of bronze sculptures and large-scale black and white drawings by acclaimed Cincinnati sculptor Stuart Fink.

Andrew Scott creates monumental figurative sculpture constructed from welded steel and wire mesh inspired by African spiritual and ceremonial figures. Sparked by the controversy, racial tension and intense media scrutiny surrounding the death of Nathanial Jones in Cincinnati on November 30, 2003, Scott will create a new site-specific installation in the gallery’s street-level exhibition space that addresses conflicting views of race, drugs, obesity and police brutality. 

In A Perfect Storm, Scott references the four turbulent issues that tragically converged on that fateful day as a metaphor represented through the juxtaposition of two disparate symbols in the installation: a monumental wire mesh bust of Jones situated on the floor that recalls the nobility of Mexican Olmec heads and the Oba heads found in African Benin bronze sculpture, and a series of six monumental welded steel batons suspended menacingly above, representing the police officers attempting to restrain Jones. The two contrasting components of the installation serve to reinforce the contradictory images of Jones following his death and his subsequent dehumanization and transformation through the media as both an object of scorn and symbol of resistance and pride.

Andrew Scott earned a bachelor of fine arts from Long Island University, South Hampton, NY, in 1986 and a master of fine arts from The Ohio State University in 1988. From 1988-91 he was a doctoral student at The Ohio State University in the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. His sculpture has been exhibited extensively in Columbus, OH including: the Columbus Museum of Art, the King Arts Complex, and the Ohio Arts Council’s Vern Riffe Center Gallery. He has exhibited nationally at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA; Long Island University, South Hampton, NY; and the National Black Arts Festival, Atlanta, GA. He has been the recipient of numerous Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships and has completed major public commissions in cities throughout Ohio including: Columbus, New Albany, Wilberforce and Dublin. In summer 2004, he relocated from Columbus, OH to Savannah, GA to accept a teaching position at Savannah College of Art and Design where he currently serves as a professor of foundation studies.