Alan Scarritt
Exhibition Projects:
Wax Pour, 1978 (wax on wood floor)
Disappearing Space, 1977 (plaster and chalk on stone wall)
Drawn and Quartered, 1980 (audio installation)
LAH DAQ, 1982 (audio installation)
Monument to Black Elk, 1997 (mixed-media construction)
In recreating two related process works from twenty years ago, Alan Scarritt chose to site them against the weathered background of an old milking barn and nearby stone wall on the Studio's grounds. These aging surroundings added the resonances of nature and the passage of time to the works, as they also guided placement and size. On the wood floor of the barn, Scarritt poured wax in two overlapping forms, a spiral and a series of concentric circles, a metaphor for the two hemispheres of the brain. Outside on the stone wall, the outer arc of the drawing seemed to sprout a small sapling, as if from the outer crust of an earthly hemisphere. Drawn in soft plaster and chalk, this piece was designed to disappear over a few months. Two audio works, also from about twenty years ago, both dealt with overlapping, feedback and their effects in the medium of sound. Drawn and Quartered juxtaposed two diverging tracks of Scarritt's inhalations and exhalations into a harmonica, while LAH DAQ, a companion piece, played back a looped section of the other work at half-speed. In the Barn Studio, Scarritt's Monument to Black Elk hung from the ceiling, a totemic construction of microphones, wires, light bulbs, animal traps and other technological objects. Referring to the Lakota visionary Black Elk, this piece balanced between melancholy accretion and a strongly symmetrical, antenna-like orientation.
Alan Scarritt's process-based works in many media reference his continuing interest
in feedback and other cyclic processes, often incorporating technology in elegant ways
-- from a pioneering interactive video transmission via NASA communications satellite
(1977), to an artists' radio project (1983), to a live webcast art performance (1999).
The artists' space he founded, Site, Cite, Sight, Inc., in San Francisco, offered artists
opportunities to create experimental work in the 1970's. Scarritt has performed at venues
including the Walker Art Center, the Knitting Factory, and the New York Fringe Festival.
He has exhibited his work in San Francisco, New York and other cities, and most recently at
Galerie Lohrl in Monchengladbach, Germany (1999). His work is in the collections of the
Museum of Modern Art and the Denver Art Museum.