MOCA GA / Calendar

Artist Statement

“I grew up in the South and tend to root through images, thoughts and memories of my own experiences. The landfill of consumer trash and global information has become my Mt. Everest, though it’s doubtful I’ll ever reach its summit. I approach my work like a writer, evolving characters into various situations and places and into predicaments of moral deliberations.

There are three bodies of work in this exhibition all connected to the concept of TRUST:

Curbside is an ongoing narrative, which looks hard at changes occurring while we blink. This work consists of 20 or more drawings that take place as we view it happening from the curb. Based on a painting of mine from 2004, this reanimated group of drawing presents a southern play on Gericault’s, Raft of the Medusa. The place is the predicament, where characters are at the mercy of the changing world around them.

In the Flood/Drought series – I engage the landscape from a personal feeling of concern for the environment – looking for some way out, some way back, and some way forward.

The Children series is a response to the current political and financial environment. How do we choose our leaders and advisors in an atmosphere of smoke and mirrors, mistrust and misinformation? Who can you believe when surrounded by so many political pundits, soothsayers, gambelers, and fortune-tellers?

I’m not sure if I TRUST anymore, but I do have an irrational faith that helps to keep me going.”

About the Artist

Scott Belville was born in Chicago in 1952, and was raised and educated in Georgia. He received an MFA in painting at Ohio University in 1977 and has taught at The University of Georgia. Belville’s solo exhibitions have taken place at the Jus de Pomme Gallery, New York; Monique Knowlton Gallery, New York; P.S. #1, New York; Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; and the High Museum of Art. He has received many awards and grants including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in painting, a Georgia Council for the Arts Grant in 1993, and a Ford Foundation Grant in 1979. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the permanent collection at MOCA GA. Among his most recent exhibitions, was the Painters Reel: Contemporary Painting in Georgia in 2010, organized by the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon and guest curated by Georgia artist Corinne Colarusso.