Scott Listfield - Fury Road

Fury Road is an exhibition of new paintings by Scott Listfield, inspired by his formative experience as a stranger in Australia.

Opening reception: Saturday, October 5, from 6–9 pm. Free entry. The artist will be in attendance.

This solo exhibition will be on view from October 6 to October 27, alongside Beau White's show, Only Human.

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.

Anyone who is familiar with Listfield’s work knows that he considers movies and pop culture and how they have shaped the way we think of the future and our place in it. When Listfield started considering the paintings he wanted to make for this show, he kept circling back to Fury Road. The Mad Max series does a frightful but weirdly beautiful job portraying a future in which we let our love of fuel outpace our love for nature and our most basic humanity. Listfield imagines that a country where most of the population lives on the fertile outposts of a mostly desert land feels deeply the fragility of the situation. He also imagines that a country very famously originated by convicts and exiles might have a deep-rooted fear of what darker portions of their past might re-surface should the environment or civilisation break down.

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 civilisation 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.

Scott Listfield (United States) grew up in Massachusetts and studied art at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. A central theme to his paintings is a single astronaut exploring landscapes riddled with contemporary references: corporate logos, pop culture artifacts and other familiar symbols in unfamiliar environments.

Listfield has exhibited his work in major cities in the United States, Europe and Canada. His work has been featured in publications such as Wired, New American Paintings and Juxtapoz. In addition, Paragon Books has published a volume featuring his works entitled Astronaut.

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