Scott Duncan

A body of sculptural, sonic and printed work exploring social history and subcultures as vehicles to navigate themes of nostalgia, identity, individual and collective trauma.

A fruit machine, piles of coins, giant ecstasy pills, a disintegrating Stone Island jacket, vintage amusement arcade ephemera and salvaged historic photographs are reworked  to elicit new meanings and understandings. These ambiguous discarded objects are hijacked to probe the ways in which contemporary society oppresses, processes and controls humans in the context of late stage capitalism and examines/proposes possible routes for resistance.

Music and sound is utilised to convey a temporal nexus where narrative strands from disparate sources intersect - millennial call centre employment, 1990s rave culture and the present day reality of Dundee as the drug death capital of Europe.

Having spent thirteen years as a social worker in Dundee, Duncan has an insider’s understanding of how state and legal power is brought to bear on those deemed to be participating in “deviant” cultures or behaviours. This theme is scrutinised via research into the visual language and aesthetic concerns of subcultures and social phenomenons: the soccer casuals of the 1980s, self-styled new age picts, utopian techno travellers and ravers of the 1990s.

In the space these cultural references/signifiers past and present, real and imaginary combine to provide immersion in a familiar yet uncanny landscape of euphoric melancholy.