Douglas Scholes
Terrible Beauties

[En anglais]

In Douglas Scholes’s exhibition at the McClure Gallery of the Visual Arts Centre, screens surround a dark room. On each, a moustachioed man played by Scholes appears in a retro-reflective vest, sorting various types of debris: lumber from a derelict cabin, litter from a shopping mall lot. In one video, he flaps the dust from a rug until he is devoured by its cloud like a slow-vanishing Houdini. And indeed, in the urban landscapes in which this flaneur custodian appears, in the polluting world to which he attends, he and his good deeds are maddeningly invisible.

For decades, Scholes has developed a deceptively casual, mordantly critical practice, pitting his one-man cleanup crew against a creaking, crumbling, world. In his early works, doomed structures made of wax bricks sagged, fell, and called for his ministrations. Here, those faulty structures are replaced by an ailing planet, desperate for our care. More Charlie Chaplin than Greta Thunberg, Scholes wears his environmentalism lightly, delighting us with scenes of his flaneur carrying to the dump garbage bag after garbage bag filled with other people’s waste. He traverses suburban sprawl, up hills, down hills, trudging clear out of town to a dustbowl dump where bulldozers consolidate a great, growing nonsense of crap. The contrast between our resistance to his unenviable work and his absolute commitment to it creates a powerful cognitive dissonance, offering a roadmap for the sort of selfless labour that an environmental crisis demands.