New Work by Scott Eagle
About The Artist
Scott Eagle is an Associate Professor of Art at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, and serves as the Area Coordinator for the Painting and Drawing program at ECU’s School of Art and Design. His paintings and illustrations have been exhibited and reproduced internationally. Publications featuring his work include The Oxford American, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Juxtapoz, and numerous books. Scott was selected by Creative Quarterly Magazine as one of their top 100 creatives for 2013. He works in a wide variety of mediums including digital and is especially interested in the idea of the creative act as thinking through making.
“Art is a vague and squishy word that can mean virtually anything. I honestly do not know if I have ever made a work of art and I no longer care. I am an object and image maker and I use objects and imagery in the same way that writers use words or musicians use sound; as a communicative medium. More specifically, I use images to represent ideas and issues that I am dealing with in my day to day life. For me the creative act and the process of making is always a learning experience and quite often the object or image that I create changes me as much as I change it.”
Artist Statement of Work
This collection of work by Scott Eagle engages complex ideas tied to dualities like life and death, power and submission, nature and artifice, creation and destruction.
In anthropology, liminality is the quality of uncertainty or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.
In this work, possibility dwells in the ambiguous space Eagle evokes through repeated and paired visual representations: weapons next to religious symbols; a songbird attempting to dwell together with a fish. Above all, he references the fragility and transitory nature of human existence with images of delicate things like butterflies and flowers, as well as skulls, traditionally used by artists as memento mori.
Eagle’s intricate aesthetic asks questions rather than providing definitive answers and invites viewers to look closely. When they do, they will find passages to hidden worlds where despair and delight coexist.