FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SCOTT FIFE Geronimo! (click here for images)

September 8 – October 28, 2006
Opening Reception: Friday, September 8 from 6-9 pm
NEW Gallery Hours: WEDNESDAY- Saturday 11 am-5 pm
TONY WIGHT / BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery
119 N. Peoria St. Chicago IL 60607
T. 312-492-7261 F.312-492-6796 info@bodybuilderandsportsman.com
Contact: Tony Wight
Press and photographic material available upon request.

TONY WIGHT / BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptural works and ink wash drawings by Scott Fife. This will be Fife’s first solo showing at Tony Wight / Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery.

Seattle based sculptor Scott Fife presents several new additions to his series of constructed cardboard heads. Initially inspired by the classical busts of the Roman Republic, Fife works with important current cultural figures whose sculpted likeness offers a tense proposition between the vital and the macabre. Rather than molding polished marble forms, Fife’s contemporary construal is roughly hewn from raw, grey, archival cardboard with screws, glue, and pencil markings as evidence of their assembly. On view will be larger than life-size heads of Kurt Cobain, Lily St. Cyr, Che Guevara, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe, and Geronimo. Accompanying the sculptural busts will be a series of large green ink wash drawings on pale pink paper of the same persons and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. They are simple yet haunting works.

Fife’s cardboard figures have a coarseness to their textured surfaces that emphasizes their physicality. Through their familiarity as highly visible icons of American culture, with earlier descriptions of Bob Dylan, Jackson Pollack, and Johnny Cash, Fife’s sculptures suggest an irascible vitality. Upon closer examination, the raw pallid grey cardboard surfaces scratched into with red pencil exude an eerie, almost ghostly impact.

The lowly material and handmade production of Fife’s sculptures contrast sharply with the glossy, highly polished images of celebrities and politicians that permeate our popular culture. As such, they examine the contemporary processes of image-making including the calculated construction of celebrity personalities. The juxtaposed heads of a grunge rock star with a Marxist revolutionary, a hero of modern architecture with a notorious Apache leader and a 1950’s pin up queen, epitomize the political, cultural, and sexual avant-garde of our time. Together they raise questions about their legacies, our memory and its manipulation.

Scott Fife received a degree in architecture from the University of Idaho, and his B.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Numerous solo and group shows have included Big Trouble at the Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City and the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington; Swallow Harder: Selections from the Ben and Aileen Krohn Collection at Frey Museum, Seattle; I am What I Am at Platform Gallery, Seattle; Heads, Spokane Falls Community College, Spokane; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma; Art LA with Platform Gallery, Los Angeles; Nouvelle Nuptials, San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design, San Francisco; Aqua Art Miami, Platform Gallery, Miami Beach; Crossroads: New Art from the Northwest at the Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle; Esther Claypool Gallery, Seattle; Port Angeles Fine Art Center, Port Angeles, Washington; Cornish Art Institute, Seattle; Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho; and Friends of Keinholz at Galerie Redmann, Berlin. Fife recently completed The Idaho Project, a project depicting 17 participants in an actual early 20th century trial that pitted mining unions against management.