Selected Press Extracts: 1980-1990

Scott MacLeay

Selected Press Clippings / Extracts / Article References

1980 1990 no reproduction without the written authorizaton of copyright owners

Extract Translation

Extract of an interview with Scott MacLeay in the French Magazine “Photo Revue” Dec 1980. « I feel the emotive quality of color and I seek it out intensely » This passionate statement of Scott MacLeay resumes his conception of his color photography work. For him, it is never the emulsion that imposes its colors. « I decide which colors are used, I built the set and I choose the model. It is via the meticulous choice of colors, light and exposure, that I obtain the pastel quality of the photos I do not want my colors to shout, I want to express myself calmly through the use of simple, detail-free forms. The color and graphic aspects of my work are often two opposing forces that procure a sense of equilibrium. » « I feel the emotive quality of color and I seek it out intensely » This passionate statement of Scott MacLeay resumes his conception of his color photography work. For him, it is never the emulsion that imposes its colors. « I decide which colors are used, I built the set and I choose the model. It is via the meticulous choice of colors, light and exposure, that I obtain the pastel quality of the photos I do not want my colors to shout, I want to express myself calmly through the use of simple, detail-free forms. The color and graphic aspects of my work are often two opposing forces that procure a sense of equilibrium. »

Miscellaneous Newspaper Clipping Extracts Article in Today’s Photographer - Winter 1981, New York, USA “Scott MacLeay works in color for the emotional quality and potential understatement it can provide” “Color Comes of Age,” Article on the new generation of color photographers exhibiting at the Space Gallery in New York. ...........................................................................................................................................

Article in the Vancouver Sun, March 9, 1981 “Called Attitudes, the exhibition is a coolly elegant and visually sophisticated bit of photographic magic “.

Susan Mertens, Art Critic, Article on Scott MacLeay’s exhibition at the Mido Gallery ...........................................................................................................................................

Le Petit Journal, Paris December 1982 When an artist is teeming with ideas and, in a word, genius, he often has a tendency to do too much in order to make his point…. Black and white portraits without-of-focus outlines, faces neatly amputated of a nose, a cheek, blurred nudes almost disappearing into the gelatin…each image is carefully staged, a completely fabricated instant. The printing is impeccable. The exhibit is a lesson in photography.

Patrick Duval, Art Critic Review of MacLeay’s exhibition “Fragments, Cycles Sons” during the Month of Photography in Paris 1982 ...........................................................................................................................................

Arkansas Gazette, November 25th, 1983, Little Rock Arkansas, USA “ MacLeay’s color prints are instantly captivating. His photographs are splendid studies of form and color, blending the shapes of the human igure and colorful, geometric backgrounds. The photographs appear more like Matisse gouaches than photographs. The viewer even resists pressing to identify the work as a photograph and the content as a igure.

The effect is remarkable and beautiful. MacLeay also works effectively with color and space relationships in much the same way that Albers did, with his famous squares” Charles Kaufman, Art Critic, Article on the travelling exhibition version of Fragments, Cycles, Sounds Critique from Litterature Art Spectacle, Feb/March 1983, Paris France

Extract Translation

Extract from the “Mois de la Photo” Catalogue November 1982, Paris, France

“I am more interested in creating a ‘presence’ than I am in telling a story or producing actionoriented images. It is for this reason that the character of the movement (particularly in my B&W images) is restrained, often ambiguous, small, passive and apparently involuntary, as opposed to ample and actively charged with intention. It has a cyclical perspective, evoking abstract, perpetual movement. The result is a sort of immobility.”

Scott MacLeay, speaking of his exhibition ‘Fragments, Cycles, Sounds’ in the Month of Photography of the City of Paris.

Extract Translation

Art Press, November 1982, Paris France

“The colors employed have no particular relation to what is natural, with the truth one expects from photography. The color has a grain which is not that of the skin but that of light. Light melts the colors.

The spectator is solicited by a system of cyclical lighting. A musical cycle is superimposed, without synchronization, on the lighting cycle, thus creating chance combinations. The spectator’s habitual approach to the space will be broken down, but only at the risk of inconveniencing him and of providing him with another sensation of himself.”

Madeleine Dechamps, Art Historian, Article on the exhibition “Fragments, Cycles, Sounds”

Extract Translation

Critique from Litterature Art Spectacle, Feb/March 1983, Paris France “A room plunged in darkness, when out of nowhere, contemporary music.

A last person met. The music imposes a new structure to our heartbeat. We are ready, ready for what? The lights slowly increase in intensity and we S M L T our hearts, while our soul now departs totally from reality. For this is most O T room closes in on itself like a shell and only the music remains to disturb T reborn from the old. This new world is colour and harmony, but a blue is not a blue, a red does not appear red and a human does not appear T these perfectly harmonious immobile fragments possess. Here, there is no S gestures here before our eyes, immobile and nonetheless strange. Canadian S M L FRAGMENTS CYCLES SOUNDS T

Jean-Luc Signamarcheix, Art critic, from an article entitled « Winter under the Sign of the Image ».

Extract Translation

Zoom Magazine, Summer 1985, Paris, France “ Scott MaLeay’s photos should be experienced via a physical rapport. While the identiication is physical, it is not psychological, his characters are regarded at a distance that prevents any sentimentality and puts me ill-at-ease. Should I identify with them, squeeze between them? Their color distances them from a carnal rapport, the faces are closed, isolated, they hide from one another, gestures pushing and holding back, others are close and far at the same time. Hands are very present: they protect from evil as one protects a child from blinding light or an overly bloody scene, like we protect him from a headache but they suffocate as well, preventing speech. Silence reigns in these photos like that of dreams when we yell for help and no cry is comes out......

These photos seem to state the horrible pain of a body that aspires to nothing more than to re-melt into the mists of time from where it emerged. The bodies here in this light sometimes evoke other emaciated bodies of our memories, but they acquire here a certain grandness, a solemnity that counterbalances cruelty. An image of a trio in which 2 characters come face-to-face with the third is like the essence of classic tragedy. What is written must come to pass, it is inevitable, but the choir is there to accompany destiny....... “ It is important that these are photographs and not drawings or paintings because the situations acquire a credibility that only a photo can provide Here we are confronted by nude bodies sculptural in aspect where the hands, neck, and legs are efigies sculpted in stone or bark, where the grain is the color of earth, of primates. And the light is that of savanna nights, full of unknown sounds when animals are unknowingly watched and we are voyeurs subjugated by a reality unaffected by time.”

Madeleine Deschamps, Art Historian and Critic, Article on the MacLeay’s Primates Series

Extract Translation

Cliché Magazine, February 1988, Paris, France “ Perhaps we should consider Scott MacLeays photos like a series of maxims, brief structures that reveal themselves and then disappear. The images are immediate; they already contain their death, as well as their rebirth. We are here before a collection of bursts of light. In black and white, in color, views of body fragments, nude fragments or more accurately, unclothed fragments loating on the border of bodies and light.

On the uncertain frontiers, we walk, we touch, eyes closed and mouths open,.........

A third plane is added to those of the light and the bodies, that of internal resonance.

Silence sweats from silenced voices, open mouths and even of puffs of light, like music that disappears, a chord that is reborn without beginning or end, le maxim is concerned as much by sound as it is by silence. The images of Scott are like singers: in top form or not.”

François Rafinot, French choreographer,

Extract Translation

Private Circus is a group where artists who originate from, and who follow, different paths cross. For a time, video artists, singers, musicians, choreographers and dancers unite to marry their arts. The irst trace of this creative cell was just released on the mythic label Sordide Sentimental. Lyricism on moods reminiscent of Tuxedo Moon or the Residents, the concept Private Circus immediately seduced Mr. Sordide, Jean-Pierre Turmel. The album is a launching pad for a pluridisciplinary project with a video and a performance version planned to enlarge Private’s universe.

The story started when photographer Scott MacLeay, fascinated by the “carnival of daily life” began writing music. To materialize his hallucinations, he began by setting up his studio. “I decided 5 years ago that to express myself musically, it was necessary to handle the production side myself. I was convinced that my compositions would not be commercial enough for a label to inance them. To earn my independence I worked 8 months a year on commercial projects for television. Private Circus is a synthesis of this commercial work and my craziest desires.”

Scott is a musician, a composer of sound-based images, but in any case, not a established instrumentalist. He therefore called on different talents according to his needs. Mid-88, he quietly began work on Les Petites Foules.

“In my head, I imagined a quartier of small business, cabarets and local inhabitants. A port where prostitutes and soul-savers from the Salvation Army rubbed elbows, a microcosm of everything marginal.”

By chance, in 1989, he met classically trained singers, Sophie Boulin and Christel Desjardin, who become members of Private Circus. Accustomed to the rigours of written scores, they discovered in this contemporary blues a free environment where all registers of singing were exploitable.

“With Scott, I made a foray into the world of rock,” explains Sophie, “its totally new and interesting.

The interpretive license allowed me to leave behind my habitual proile of object in the hands of a composer. But it remains Scott’s music, a universe to which I feel very close, but which is not mine. It was clear to everyone that we were to use all our musical and vocal talents to go in Scott’s direction.”

Twelve artists participated in the album that conjures up a curious mix of emotions, laughter and malaise. A surrealistic mixture in the service of reality, this surgical analysis of ordinary folly has a bitter beauty.

“It is a pessimistic vision of the world by an eternal optimist. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel. The individual can always make it, the world…I am not so sure.”

Myrian Léon, Music critic, Best Magazine