the concept . . .

Parallel Lines • 15 Minutes of Fame is a series of photo-based encaustic paintings (subjective "happenings" with a prison bed), with an interactive sculpture installation entitled 15 Minutes of Fame featuring the bed and suitcase depicted in the paintings.

Artist's Statement:

Years ago I met a Cree youth who told me that within sixteen years he had been through fourteen foster homes. He felt unloved and unwanted. "One day," he told me, "I was so depressed, I threw a shovel through a jeweller's window: I knew at least I'd be wanted in jail."

His story stayed with me. Years later I was given an opportunity to create works with prison beds. This arose through an art commission in which I was invited to create artworks utilizing waste from government buildings. Correctional Services Canada asked what I could do with discarded prison beds. I was intrigued with the challenge. With the youth's story re-sounding in my mind, I took a prison bed around the city of Toronto and engaged photographer John Davidson to document a series of my live solo performance ‘happenings’ through digital photography.

The photos, printed on archival paper, are mounted on birch panels forming a base upon which I apply layers of encaustic (wax) paint to create imagined possibilities blurring the boundary between painting and photography. The original photo captures only a partial version of reality - aspects of the location, mood and lighting. I delve into the image to exploit the tangible but not captured on film, the invisible possible inner life beyond the borders. I fuse the lines between reality and imagination, the actual and the possible, real and remembered, the inner and outer worlds. The result is a series of evocative and deliberately ambiguous photo-based encaustic paintings exploring choice as a determining element in our lives.

Parallel Lines is the third project in a series of works featuring prison beds reclaimed from the former Kingston Penitentiary for Women and previously slept upon by an array of disturbed and occasionally notorious women.

see also:

LockDown

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15 Minutes of Fame

- an interactive installation created and facilitated by Amanta Scott, featuring:

• a bare prison bed (from the former Kingston Penitentiary for Women)
• a prison blanket, sheet & pillow; and,
• a standard-issue prison suitcase containing assorted personal items . . .

Visitors are invited to:

• open the suitcase; consider, select and arrange items upon and around the bed to create a new installation - a personal artistic statement about incarceration - then:
  
• present and discuss their installation with other visitors
  
• write about their installation in the Book of Fame, which is on site and open for everyone to read.
  
• Other visitors are invited to write comments about this and other installations in the Book of Fame.
  
• Each installation remains on display for a maximum of 15 minutes.
• Installations are documented through digital photos and posted subsequently online.
  

looking back . . .