Scott Sueme: The Garden at the Purple House

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Scott Sueme, "The Garden at the Purple House," 2022

installation view

Exhibition Statement: The Garden at the Purple House

Scott Sueme’s The Garden at the Purple House, is a slow development of paintings and sculptures created over the last year and a half. Named after his mother’s garden at his childhood home, the exhibition’s concept was seeded after her decision to downsize due to the home’s demanding upkeep. In this series, the work chronicles the connection between our memory, imagination and how the two are curiously dependent on one another. In processing the transience of childhood, Sueme explores a cognitive blur, where perceiving the future can feel as vivid as the way we remember.

Sueme’s work builds upon itself as fragments of resurfaced memories, resulting in a language of arrangements and colour compositions. Familiar motifs such as mushrooms, Chinese lattice designs, breeze blocks and flowers, carry a nostalgic resonance – recreating a narrative of the past in the present. The work’s handmade qualities explore deeper apprehensions of vitality and abundance, with generative forces of nature emanating through the sporadic sampling of patterns among various materials. Natural cycles of growth are mirrored in the work through variegated acrylic textures as seen in “Old Growth (Climax Community),” the sprouting physicality of small sculptures “Unidentified Species,” and the expansiveness and protrusion of wall sculptures “As Above” and “So Below”. Artist-made frames and the evolved rawness of medium, expanding clay, steel, and various species of wood, speaks to a respect for honest labour and resourcefulness. Sueme’s work is a bountiful repercussion of personal history and culture encapsulated through the view of everyday life.

— Madison Smart, Vancouver, 2022