Scott Treleaven
cara frater, 2004
paper on board
14" x 11"

Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present Scott Treleaven in an exhibit of 14 new collage works and the launch of a special DVD limited edition of his cult film THE SALiVATION ARMY (each edition accompanied by a print). This is Scott Treleaven's first solo show.

Imbued with heavy narrative and allegorical elements, Treleaven's work is a collusion of raw punk motifs, symbolist-influenced imagery, and personal documentation of the 21st Century underground. Using a montage approach to film and canvas alike, he champions the neglected visual history of outsiders and fringe dwellers in their own vernacular. Rather than turning to the mainstream social and religious systems that condemn them, the subjects of Treleaven's work are shown actively creating adjunct cultures they can truly call their own. Mirroring William Blake's dreams of Albion it is a world replete with its own set of secret social codes and guarded systems of exchange and belief.

Already an established name in independent and underground circles, Treleaven's 22-minute film, THE SALiVATION ARMY (2002), nabbed a "Best of 2002" listing from the Village Voice and has been variously compared to Jarman, Anger, Dennis Cooper, and William Burroughs' seminal gay manifesto, The Wild Boys. The harrowingly Romantic story of the rise and fall of a gang of young gay radicals, THE SALiVATION ARMY draws heavily on Treleaven's own experience publishing a zine of the same name, bringing together his eye for potent imagery and his interest in street-level mythologies.

Similarly, the scenes of orgiastic exotica that make up the artist's pictures have conjured associations with Moreau, Géricault, and even CB DeMille, as photos of comely young Paris Commune rioters revolt alongside 17th Century woodcuts of witches' sabbats, Victorian Hellfire Club meetings, and Treleaven's own personal photographs of the modern progeny of these traditions. Using mechanical reproduction as a leveling agent, his meticulous layering of stark black and white photocopies evokes a distinctly noir sensibility while the medium also serves to allude to zine culture, anarchist broadsheets, and underground missives. Eruptions of Japanese floral paper heighten Treleaven's Baroque, staggered compositions and emphasize the violent clash of disparately circulating levels of cultural imagery: the fierce, vivid melding of low and high, lyrical and political, tragic and heroic.

About the Artist
Scott Treleaven is a Toronto-based artist, writer and filmmaker, best known for his zine-cum-film 'THE SALiVATION ARMY', listed by the Village Voice as one of the most notable underground films of 2002. His fiction and critical writings have been published internationally, and his collage work has recently been exhibited at Deitch Projects and D'Amelio Terras in New York; Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles; the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; and Gallerie du jour agnes b in Paris. An archive of images, events and writings can be found at: www.scotttreleaven.com