Filo Sofi Arts invites you to celebrate with us as we launch our Digital Première of the work of Iris Scott. Please join us for The Big Wonderful, presented in collaboration with Burnet Fine Art.
The virtual event will take place at 12 pm EST Tuesday, May 26, when we will also celebrate Iris’ birthday. Access to a digital viewing room will be extended after the event. Click here to register.
Rejoice with us in all that is big. Iris’ canvases stretch on for yards, immersing us in their rich chromoscapes. Filo Sofi Arts is taking this opportunity to transition to a new kind of immersion with a digital reception featuring a conversation between artist, curator, and philosopher.
Filo Sofi’s mission is to bring artists and philosophers together into collaboration and discourse. At The Big Wonderful Virtual Première, come with a childlike curiosity to explore our dramatic departure from the sameness of our current reality.
“While the value of finger painting may have been questionable prior to Scott’s arrival, the works here are those of an artist who has cultivated a technique to new and unprecedented heights,” Aruta said.
The Big Wonderful constitutes a return, a homecoming for and in art. Though planned before the COVID-19 pandemic, The Big Wonderful somehow anticipates the turning-inward our world is experiencing now, a return to and transcendence beyond the vulnerability, rebelliousness, and wonder we could find in childhood, when our geographic range was limited — but our imaginations were not. Now, The Big Wonderful invites us to celebrate this return, not naïvely, but as a return after a long journey into night; a morning’s return to daylight, to laughter, to a joy all the more significant because it is a joy made conscious of its precarity and therefore, of its preciousness.
These works were inspired by Iris Scott’s recent relocation to New Mexico, where she is now sheltering at home, inspired by her surroundings.
“In this isolation, separated from society, I can hear the animals talking again, and they are saying: paint us, paint us…paint the strange, the wonderful, the joyous, and the mad creatures, paint the desert flooded by the sea,” Scott said. “Art associated with nature often gets called childlike, cuddly, warm, pretty, feminine — all the dirty words that I love. I am here to assert the legitimacy of instinctualist aesthetics, to be the champion of art that appeals to children and adults who want to feel wonder.”
The Big Wonderful invites us to take a moment to let all that is big and wonderful in this world wash over us — and we invite you to explore Scott’s work and instinctualist aesthetics philosophy in an hour-long digital reception.
Donovan Irven 