HUGH SCOTT-DOUGLAS

Hugh Scott-Douglas is perhaps best known todayfor his abstract, pattern-rich panels and installations. He uses a widevariety of techniques—from photography, laser cutting, to inkjetprinting—that take as their subject and visual language various methodsand networks of production and transaction. Across his practice,Scott-Douglas investigates the possibilities and limitations of theproduction of the photographic image at a turning point in the medium’shistory, as it makes the conversion from modes of mechanicalreproduction towards digital technologies. This series Natural Historyis a group of printed paintings originating from digital photographs ofthe peripheries of the wildlife dioramas of the American Museum ofNatural History, New York City. Instead of exposing the realities of theocean, the museum’s staged plastic environment promotes an idealizedand fixed ecosystem, which exists outside of the perilous realms ofhuman influence. Appropriating the protocols of the capitalist treatmentof images, he captures and processes these pseudo-worlds with asuccession of artificial intermediaries.