Scott Stulen
Region: Midwest
I work within the space between memory and the patterned landscape of popular culture. Emerging from a foggy haze of childhood memories, my work is a delicately woven fabric of images, associations, and stories, a reconstruction of faint memories filtered through the "cabin culture" aesthetic of my childhood home and the landscape of the Midwest. My work is a reconstruction of memory, and the awkward, often false, associations within. I investigate fictitious memories often substituted for actual experience. For example, a memory based not on a pure recollection but derived from a photograph of a place or event.
Through various media I combine, recombine, and invent new environments, recontextulizing multiple references into a singular work. Like a DJ I select and sequence materials, images, and themes to create new associations and unexpected points of entry. Underlying my work is a sense of playfulness and humor, which questions authenticity, experience, and the construction of personal and collective memory. For example, restaging the opening shot of the Little House on the Prairie television program as a graffiti tagged backdrop or juxtaposing animals borrowed from animated films with iconic works of early post-modernism.