Shanghai 803 - Explosion Collage

Scott Springer is an artist and architect who lives and works in Westport, Connecticut and Manhattan. His work is a collection of impressions of imaginary spaces that suggest to the viewer alternate spatial and emotional realms and endeavor to convey the complexities of collective experience. Many of his recent pieces integrate small items accumulated during the course of life: miscellaneous scraps of paper, boarding passes, tickets, postcards, et cetera. Some of these are seemingly inconsequential while others hold sentimental value. These fragments function as primary compositional elements and their juxtapositions form compressed chronologies of experiences and memories. Depending on picture size, arrangement of elements, and treatment of interstitial space, the pieces display visual characteristics of things as varied as dense structural connection details, building juxtapositions, brick patterns, wood paneling, urban street grids and landscapes. After several years of working almost exclusively at a small scale—typically making postcard size collages and ink drawings—he recently completed his first piece at a much larger scale: eight feet high by two feet wide. This piece became the first in an ongoing series of large scale works that further investigate the relationship of individual fragments to one another and how the spaces between them coalesce as a distinct system as layers of paint are applied to the surface over a period of time. The themes explored in this large scale series have now begun to influence the visual character of the postcard size pieces.