Vanity Case

“Vanity Case” brings together recent works by painter Rebecca Scott and sculptor/installation artist Mark Woods. Its deliberately suggestive title operates on several levels. A “vanity case” is a small container used to carry the various practical tools for personal grooming—a compact kit for achieving the “perfect” personal form. While Woods’ intricate, multi-part assemblages and bespoke suitcases readily echo this standard accessory, the connection to Scott’s work is subtler. Paintings are containers too, and Scott’s new works focus on notions of vanity and self-regard. Her immediate pictorial sources are fashion images from Vogue and her own recent selfies. Both these found and personal photographs are transformed through her painterly interpretation. The artist further processes her images with textual additions applied directly to the canvas—sometimes poetry by her late mother, other times text by South African writer and activist Nadine Gordimer. These interventions act both as erasure and as conscious amplification of the pictorial image.