We stand at a precipice we have created for ourselves

“I just paint, and then… you know, then ‘you’ assign meaning,” says Scott Greene about his paintings.

I certainly assign a great deal of meaning to the paintings included in his recent show, “Bewilderness”, at 516 ARTS. To me, they show us the insanity of the world we have constructed for ourselves, and the end of “nature” as we imagine it to be.

But perhaps we can learn something about the meaning of his paintings from Scott Greene himself. Here is the artist’s statement about the show:

“Bewilderness exists beyond imagination, myth and reality. It is located somewhere between Arcadia and dystopia, and where the past and present collide. It is a state of mind in which contradiction is essential and even celebrated. Awe-inspiring natural beauty revealed to be a construct, it is a refuge with no shelter, a place of spiritual certainty, utter confusion and blissful ignorance.”

My favorite of the paintings included in the show is La Bajada Bluff, showing a buffalo falling from a cliff of human waste, a cliff about to collapse under its own weight. Our waste is, of course, a visible manifestation of the climate change we have caused, because it is the industrial processes that create the waste that have led us into the predicament in which we now find ourselves: literally on a precipice of choice about our future and the future of the next generation.

Will we choose to pull back from the cliff? Will we choose to eliminate fossil fuels from our lives and ensure that some of us have a future?