Representing the World: On the art of Scott McFarland

Trove image by Scott McFarland. Nail Fetish, Congo, and Kota, Bakota Reliquary Figure, Gabon. Private Collection.

Scott McFarland’s recent large-scale, wide-format photographs are ambitious, technically complex documentary-style pictures that embody multiple moments and hold a passage of time within a single composite image. Underlying this approach is the artist’s desire to slow down time and invite viewers to linger in a building, a garden, a street, an urban park or the countryside in order to capture a completely original and often contradictory realism. Where traditional analog photographs are often seen as the representation of a single, decisive moment, McFarland’s pictures are constructed from many exposures; they collage together different moments under similar conditions or the appearance of a single time. Nevertheless, his work often has the appearance of a decisive moment, or what he calls a “singular super moment” — a layered multiplicity of times and an extended spatial quality that belie a single exposure. 

It would seem that the artist’s way of making pictures has greatly informed Trove, the show of photographs that he has produced, working in a new partnership with his studio, PARTISANS and Luminato. Bringing together three different space-time configurations — one emanating from the object photographed, be it an antique African sculpture, a Blue Jays ring or a white rhino; another from the fictional Kunsthaus that houses the object; and finally that of the very real Hearn Power Station — it is as if McFarland beckons us to imagine a new dimension, a future time in the city of Toronto. In this not-so-far-out science fiction, the Hearn has been transformed from a derelict power station into a state of the art gallery framing a multiplicity of objects seen together for the very first time. 

McFarland works in a moment of transition, between two worlds of technological representation. He does so less in order to insist on the priority of one over the other — whether digital or analog — than to draw us ever closer to the visual surface of things, a drive that we could say lies at the very heart of the photographic project. In this way, at a moment when so many theorists and practitioners of photography are declaring a fundamental break from the past, he enacts a suture, a stitch that links disparate epochs and geographies. In his monumental photographs, McFarland does not only represent repatriation, he enacts it, returning photography to its fundamental task of representing the world.

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