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Scott Northrup

Where the Boys Are | 18″ x 22″ x 10″ | 9-channel video sculpture with appripriated video and found electronics | 2015


Artist Statement

I am most interested in questions of love, lust, loss, and desire, especially the feelings that we secretly harbor for one another. My work explores these ideas through personal and collective memories, actual and constructed experiences, and tangling and untangling the very loose threads that connect us.
I often employ found objects and appropriated images and texts, which are preloaded with history and meaning, in addition to my original material. I see this as a form of cultural shorthand toward my personal visual vocabulary, an attempt to communicate with others while filling in the blanks of memory and persona. I reproduce and manipulate these pre-existing objects and images through assemblage, collage, re-photography, hand-sewing, mold-making and casting, and other means.
Temporality is very important to me, not only because of my work with film and video, which inherently deal with time, but in the pursuit of making fleeting thoughts, emotions, and smells more concrete than they are in the performance of our lives. The inclusion of religious and popular iconography in my work takes into account these parallel forms of worship while aiming at a larger sense of function and design. Through the construction of self-portraits, personal landmarks, and mash notes to an unfulfilled American Dream, I am self-mythologizing, while exploring objects and actions that might seem remarkably unremarkable on their own.

Artist Website + Social Media:
https://scottnorthrup.com/home.html
Instagram @scott_northrup

MR/QD Is Made Possible BY

Artists stipends made possible by Kresge Arts in Detroit

For details and more info on making a contribution to Mighty Real/Queer Detroit, please contact us at info@mrqd.org

About MR/QD

Mighty Real/Queer Detroit is an art exhibition in June 2022 devoted to 77 years (1945-2022) of Detroit LGBTQ+ art 

The exhibition presents a month-long historical examination of the diversity of the LGBTQ+ community and its longtime allies, featuring established & emerging Detroit artists, as well as artists whose careers were shortened by HIV/AIDS.

Mighty Real/Queer Detroit is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization committed to promoting positive and meaningful images of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community through artistic and intellectual means. © 2023. All Rights Reserved.