Reflecting Pool
Reflecting Pool | 2024
Reflecting Pool is an installation by Scott Andrew that integrates video, AI generative animation, and sound into a sculptural floor work resembling a pool of water that refracts and reflects various personas that are performed by the artist. This work is an extension of previous works like Scott’s MFA thesis at Carnegie Mellon University, entitled, Gilding the Lily, and Phase-Shift which was presented at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and various other video and sculptural sketches. The work takes on the form of a lens, peering beyond the void and into other queer and opulent speculative worlds. This work merges concepts and interests in media like Black Mirror, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and mythical narratives like the mythology of Narcissus as explored through James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, as well as countless depictions in art history. The work is discursive of investigations into alternative forms of masculinity, and gender queer fantasy, as well as the permeability of space-time, and post-humanism. It is a work that lives as a form of metaphysical archeology that digs into other realities.
Pulling inspiration from Jongwoo Jeremey Kim’s text Male Bodies Unmade, this work aligns with the multiplicitous analysis of David Hockney’s series of paintings, such as Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) and California, that depict gay male bodies in swimming pools and their relationships to narcissism, fluidity, desire, and death. Kim writes, ‘In California, the water’s surface is so opaque as to resist any notion of measurable depth. Neither fully abstract nor fully figurative, it is an ambiguous space that is ceaselessly transitional.’
Reflecting Pool depicts an unfixed form of identity, cosmically and locally seeking oneness within other selves and world(s) that literally and figuratively dive into the murky waters of memory and fantasy. Like Narcissus’s misrecognition of self, obsession, death and rebirth, the virtual variants of the artist’s psyche dematerialize and are reformed throughout deep time, and multiversal space.
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