Scott MacLeod has been presenting live, time-based, conceptual & static work in the San Francisco Bay Area and internationally since 1979. His installations, paintings & sculptures have been widely exhibited in the Bay Area at venues including Southern Exposure, The Lab, George Lawson Gallery, and SFMOMA as well as internationally in the Czech Republic, Belgium, England, Italy and Germany. Visual arts awards include the San Francisco Art Institute’s Adaline Kent Award (2000) and a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Visual Arts Award (2001). His fiction, poetry, theater and critical writings have been widely published in the USA and abroad, and he has co-produced several international cultural exchange projects between USA, France, Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. He lives in Oakland, California.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I create situations in which materials and processes can “be themselves” without constraints
of expectation or convention. Found-object sailing ships, reconfigured dartboards, fake museums,
and other experiments exhibit qualities simultaneously of craft and accident, high tragedy and low
comedy, intriguing mystery and unsettling familiarity. I take things apart and put them back together
in a “wrong” way, to show where the edges of emotion, power, language and pedagogy overlap
and cut into each other, without admitting that’s what I’m doing. My best works resist visual and
cognitive resolution, hovering between representation and abstraction, referring to both while
capitulating to neither.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS / INSTALLATIONS
2020 Stowaways, Burlington Hotel & Bull Valley Roadhouse, Port Costa CA February-July
2018 Museum of Dubious Navigation, North Church, Tides Institute & Art Museum, Eastport ME
Three-Ring Orchestra, ProArts, Oakland CA
2017 Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, Cricket Engine, Oakland CA (w/Jakub Kalousek)
2016 USS Silver Clipper, St. Mary's Art Center, Virginia City NV
2015 Dead Reckoning, Shadow Office, Oakland CA
Anxiety!, NIAD Art Center, Richmond CA
The Bitter Sorrows of Scott MacLeod, Galerie Svít, Prague, Czech Republic
Residency Exhibition, The Compound, Emeryville CA
2014 Betaville, Smokey’s Tangle, Oakland CA
Waisted, Cricket Engine, Oakland CA (w/Jakub Kalousek)
2013 Museum of Bitter Sorrows: Useless Magic, Smokey’s Tangle, Oakland CA
2012 Quitters Comfort, Cricket Engine, Oakland CA (w/Jakub Kalousek)
2011 11/11/11, San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, San Francisco CA
Museum of Bitter Sorrows: The Wreck of the Halcyon, Cricket Engine, Oakland CA
2010 Museum of Bitter Sorrows: My Life Is a Prison, Saint Mary’s Art Center, Virginia City NV
2009 Museum of Bitter Sorrows: Helter Shelter, Soap Gallery, San Francisco CA
The Trouble I Had, Room For Painting Room For Paper, SF CA (aka George Lawson Gallery)
2007 Lost Coming Back This Way, Cricket Engine, Oakland CA
2006 WC Gallery, DePere, Wisconsin
2004 North Oakland Temporary Museum, Oakland CA
2001 Galerie Libresso ELM, Ostrava, Czech Republic
2000 Closer To Home, Adaline Kent Award Exhibition, Walter-McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute
Bleed, (2-person show) Cellspace, SF CA
1998 Dhghmunculus, (2-person show) The Lab, SF CA
Alien Encounters, Temple Gallery/Kortrijks JOVC, Kortrijks, Belgium
1996 The New Man Is Learning To Swim, Dominic Centrum, Plzeň, Czech Republic
National Gallery for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic
1995 Shrewd Little Angels, Collision, SF CA
Even If Such An Object Outside Us Were Unimportant, Southern Exposure Gallery, SF CA
1991 Trace Elements, Podvornice Cultural Center, Dubravka, Czechoslovakia