When artist Scott Wright says, “I am most interested in painting the things that scare me,” he’s not talking about the part where he hangs out into yawning space from airplane windows and door-less helicopters jockeying his six-foot frame and big, bulky camera to shoot pictures. What scares him is what he sees happening to his planet below.
As an artist and a global warming bell sounder, Wright strives to create lasting impressions. In one supercharged work of the untamed, two tornadoes bear down on a parking lot, a car in the foreground blurred in the driver’s attempt to get out of their way. In an aerial image, Wright offers up the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, its cooling towers billowing into the atmosphere superheated steam that was once water in the Susquehanna River. His point: “Everything in our purview has become a commodity and we increasingly count on technology to save us on the one hand from what we are doing with the other. Technology helps us to thrive in many ways, but it also has us transfixed and we’re not paying attention to the bigger picture.”
At the Villanova University Art Gallery (Jan 9-Feb 14, 2013)
