Untitled (Fold), 2008

Whether it’s a camera he’s holding or merely a set of pencils, Chris Scarborough likes to mix things up. Mushroom clouds wearing eerie grins and manipulated photographs of women with enlarged cartoon eyes make up the crux of Scarborough’s imagery. A single piece can either stand alone or serve as a representation of his full body of work. Scarborough’s fascinations with pop culture and the thin line between horror and beauty regularly jump between graphite and film. Yet, the artist swings from one medium to the other organically, sometimes staging a photograph based on an original drawing, other times rendering in pencil a moment already captured on film. Both methods appear to hinge on Scarborough’s desire to disturb a complacent or expectant nature of seeing while also acknowledging the sometimes absurd texture of Eastern culture. Not surprisingly, anime and Japanese manga like “Akira” play key roles in Scarborough’s work, though Walt Disney should also be given some credit. Yanking things out of their original context, hurling them into another, and waiting for a reaction is another favored practice, found most often in Scarborough’s war drawings. In Untitled (Subterfuge), mushroom clouds held aloft by trunks of weaponry are beginning to take shape, hovering in blank space as if waiting for something to occur. Near the bottom, a perfectly-shaped cloud is smiling fiendishly, reiterating Scarborough’s initial question — who’s to say what is grotesque versus cute?
     This spring, Scarborough will be showing new work at the Curator’s Office in Washington D.C. and the Copro Nason Gallery in Santa Monica.