SCOUT ZABINSKI: VIOLIN THEORY
Carl Kostyál is delighted to present ‘Violin Theory’ by Los-Angeles based artist Scout Zabinski, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
September 26 – October 20, 2024
In Zabinski’s own words, ‘Violin Theory’ is “the idea, or reality rather, that if you play a violin at a certain pitch next to an idle violin, the untouched violin will begin to vibrate and emit the same note. For me, the same interconnectivity exists between people and art, within profound relationships, and in moments I call glimmers. It’s the ceaseless human mission, to suspend our own identities and open ourselves up to the magic of higher vibrations and assimilate or echo their melodies.”
For ‘Violin Theory’, Zabinski has turned Darwinian, theatrically staging the evolution of Western painting across her canvases. In ‘Instinct’, she commands the surrealist fantasy of Leonora Carrington; in ‘Grassy Patch’, she materialises into Manet’s Olympia; and deep inside the Leonardesque, umber-hued grotto of ‘Where I Met You, Why I Love You, Where I Found Me’, she transforms into a Botticellian fantasy, cutting the same contrapposto stance as his Venus in the Uffizi. The quasi-Vitruvian triptych, altarpiece-like in its monumentality, is filled with an abundance of art historical references: even its composition and title loosely recall Gauguin’s post-impressionist masterpiece, ‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?’.
Zabinski’s intentions for ‘Violin Theory’ are twofold. On the one hand, she is making a statement: I am both an artist and art historian. On the other, by using such iconography and inserting herself into canonical imagery (‘Glass Castle’ could be read as a successor to Artemisia Gentileschi’s ‘Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting’), she highlights for the viewer the cyclical nature of art itself – how, in perpetuity, it mutates, echoes, and evolves.
Post ‘Violin Theory’, the artist has begun to experiment with the possibilities of photography. In a rather Duchampian tone (think his various iterations of ‘La Boîte-en-valise’, each containing reproductions of his past works), Zabinski selected one of the works from the exhibition, ‘Conservas’, and began to reimagine it in photographic form with McCabe Slye.
Playing with the elasticity of the medium, she is now beginning to test the very idea of what constitutes an original work of art. Thus, even after the exhibition’s supposed conclusion, Zabinski continues to reverberate from the works, inspirations and moments of her past, producing the new and the fantastical.