Interview: Scott Myles, artist

International success Scott Myles is laying it on with a trowel in the city of his birth, finds Moira Jeffrey

International success Scott Myles is laying it on with a trowel in the city of his birth, finds Moira Jeffrey

ON A BLAZINGLY bright spring day a team of around 20 bricklayers are hard at work in Dundee, creating three large, parallel brick walls. Bricks are passed around in pairs. There’s a pleasing rhythmic slosh as fresh mortar is applied. In their high-visibility vests and hard hats, the workmen are clearly feeling the heat.

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There’s only one thing that’s slightly unusual about this scene: the building site is indoors. The main gallery at Dundee Contemporary Arts is being transformed under the direction of an artist. Scott Myles’s new show This Production is in production.

The new work, Displaced Façade (for DCA) is based on a tricky illusion devised by SITE architects in 1979: look at it one way and the three walls appear to be a single impenetrable wall of brick; see it from another angle and you realise you can literally break free and walk right through it.

There is something pleasingly circular about this scene. Glasgow-based Myles, who at 37 has works in internationally important collections such as the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, grew up locally and studied drawing and painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. Among the teams from local companies working with sponsor Ibstock Bricks are a group of young apprentices from Angus College, where Myles took his portfolio course before going to college. His father was a river pilot on the Tay and the young Myles used to skateboard in this very building when it was an abandoned (and brick-walled) factory. “It was unofficial, squatted,” he recalls. “It was about doing things proactively.”

As a young artist, Myles was nothing if not proactive. Before he even left Dundee he had created an exhibition in his late grandfather’s flat in Tayport entitled Suburban Affair. After a short stint in Vancouver, he moved to Glasgow in 1999. The first opening he recalls attending at the city’s Transmission Gallery was Jim Lambie’s. Before long he was showing with Lambie’s gallery, The Modern Institute, and was inviting artists to show in his own flat.

These days he has a peripatetic international career, but with local roots like this, he is highly critical of the changes in licensing law that are jeopardising grassroots scenes of self-organised shows in flats and public spaces across Scotland. “It’s how I got started,” he says. “It was about working with your peer group, not waiting for things to happen or for someone to come and knock at your door.”

Myles’s art is a heterogeneous affair, crowded with ideas and different forms and media. He has a longstanding interest in printmaking and photography, makes sculptures and transforms found objects.

His work seems to coalesce around ideas of making and re-making, where purposes are thwarted, objects re-purposed and de-purposed, utilitarian objects become plinths, existing artworks are re-invented and traditional economies subverted.

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In his DCA show, for example, Myles will show a new work in his series of bus stop sculptures, an old Perspex and metal bus stop that has been re-sprayed into a shiny mirrored sculpture, yet is still complete with all of its scratches and graffiti. “It’s a mirror,” he says. “It’s a portrait of where it’s from.”

Why is he interested in a bus stop? “It’s a low-tech architecture, a place where people stand and wait and ponder, you think about things, you watch the world go by.”

This sense of dreaming in the everyday and of the possibility of transformation is a longstanding interest. As a young artist he worked with a local community group in Dundee. “Rather than using the £40 we got for art materials we wrote a cheque, put it in a bottle and gave it to the captain of a ship in Dundee harbour. He dropped it into the sea off Lowestoft.”

Two-and-a-half years later it turned up, as though in a fable or fairytale, washed up on the shore on an island just off Gothenburg. “We took some of the children to Sweden to meet the guy who found it, on the beach where it was found.”

Transformations, however, can also be painful, and not all fables have a happy ending. In Dundee, Myles’ will also show STABILA (Black and Blue) a series of prints, which are based on the court productions used in a Glasgow court case in 2008.

It was, he says, “a dispute between two builders, one of them picked up a STABILA brand spirit level and they had a fight and he hit the other one with it”. Balance, precision, the use of tools (spirit levels are also used in galleries and will be essential for the installation of the work) tip from order into a kind of chaos.

“It’s also whether the piece is a comment on a post-industrial city like Glasgow or Dundee,” says Myles. “Where men don’t know what to do with their tools any more so they pick up their spirit level and smash someone else with it.”

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For the artist, This Production is a key moment in his own ongoing transformation, but he is resistant to the idea that the work can be simply understood in terms of his life so far.

Indeed the brickwork in the gallery articulates that very conundrum. “Where does work come from?” asks Myles.

He reads me a quote from Milan Kundera: “Given that the novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel, how tenuous must be the validity of those who set themselves to undo what the novelist has undone and redo what he undid.”

“It’s strange as an artist; you make work that comes from lots of different places, but then to make a show in the town I was born in and studied in and the building I used to skateboard in…” he pauses, and perhaps thinks about the young person he once was.

Scott Myles: This Production is at Dundee Contemporary Arts from Saturday until 10 June

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