Scott Fife Esto Perpetua

June 30 to August 7, 2024
Artist Reception, Thursday, June 30, 6 to 8PM

For the gallery's last exhibition its Pioneer Square space before moving to its online-only presence, Platform is very pleased to present new sculptural works and drawings by Scott Fife.

Some thoughts …
… on apparitions of a novelist and a poet, literary giants long gone, resting in sleeping bags, void of their bodies. These sculptures are not a memorial.

In sleeping bags the figures are playful, reflective, intimate, transitory, sharing thoughts, rafting through the ebb and flow of re-evaluation, and disappearing into the many, nightly, in sleeping bags ... in forgotten dreams.

Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound met in Paris, part of the Lost Generation, and remained good friends throughout their lives. Ernest Hemingway: hero; Ezra Pound: anti-hero.

Ezra: fascist, convicted of treason, generous supporter of writers careers, T. S. Elliot and James Joyce, brilliant translator of others’ voices, and a teacher.

Ernest: pugilist, voracious, handsome, vindictive, big game hunter, bullfight aficionado, and six-toed-cat lover. Ernst Hemingway, sixty-one years of age, committed suicide at his home in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1961.

Seventy-six years earlier Ezra Pound was born in Haley, Idaho, the mining town down the road from Sun Valley. While living in Italy he referred to himself as the "Idaho Kid."

Esto perpetua.

Scott Fife has been exhibiting his sculptures and drawings since 1976 in Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and Vancouver, BC, including at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Frye Museum, Seattle, WA; Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; Museum of Northwest Art, LaConner, WA; Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane, WA; Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID; Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, MT; and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC. This is Scott’s fifth exhibition with Platform.