Consulation

Scott Listfield’s “Fury Road” at Beinart Gallery.

Opening on Saturday, October 5th, 2019 at Beinart Gallery in Brunswick, Victoria, Australia is artist Scott Listfield’s fantastic solo exhibition, “Fury Road.”

Listfield, an American artist, hopped on a plane to Australia 3 days after graduating from a small college in the United States. His destination was convenient: his father was working in Australia at the time.  But his real goal was to go very far away, where he had never been, and without much of a plan for what would come next.

Listfield spent a lot of time wandering alone in an unfamiliar city, country and continent where he barely knew a soul. He explored, took some classes and painted a few landscapes that he deemed “exceedingly mediocre.” He was 21 years old and had no idea what the next chapter in his life might look like. His time in Australia was a brief and strange pause between childhood and adulthood that he knew would not last long.

Upon returning home from Australia, he still felt like an explorer, a stranger in his own home town. He wanted to capture that feeling of wandering alone in a place he had never been before and possibly would never come back to, of being an alien amongst things that feel hauntingly familiar. A lot of Listfield’s experiences from this time inspired his first astronaut paintings. Listfield has been painting astronauts now for a while, but those feelings still resonate today.

For his first solo show in Australia, Listfield wanted to say something about the country where he lost himself before he eventually found himself. He wanted to make paintings about a very wild and beautiful country while admitting to being an outsider: like the astronaut in his work, he is not from the land he is depicting.

“Fury Road” is a series of 18 brand-new paintings which all take place in a desert continent where everywhere there are signs of a civilization that has been left to rot and rust away. Cars, boats, and buildings turn to dust. There are animals here still, but they seem out of place and perhaps out of time. Wandering throughout is the astronaut featured in earlier paintings, now following dusty paths that used to be roads and rivers.

The exhibition will be on view until October 27th, 2019.

-