Scott Horsley: I Learned it from Watching You

Scott Horsley’s work discusses the parallels between nourishment and destruction, the ways in which everything we create can be used for better or for worse. The following story is Horsley’s realization of this concept, which encompasses the entirety of his exhibition, I Learned it from Watching You:

“I learned from a documentary that some of the first tools humans taught each other to make were stone spear-tips. Did you know that, too? The earliest spear-tips predate spoken language. People taught each other to use them to hunt food and to fight one another.

Later: spoken languages.
Later: written words.
Later: books.
Later: instructional videos.

When my son was born, we received a pressure cooker as a gift. ‘Use it to jar your homemade baby food.’ It came with instructions. We learned how to use the tool to make family food. Later, a pressure cooker was used to make a bomb in Boston. Then they were bombs in New York. It sat on our stove, making beans.

I have seen videos that teach you how to cook with pressure cookers. Rice, lentils, salmon. I learned from a news report that the bomb-makers watched instructional videos from an online magazine.

That reminded me of when I was younger and heard about a book called The Anarchist Cookbook. No one I knew had ever actually seen it, but people told me that it was full of dangerous information. I heard that the person who wrote that cookbook changed his mind and fought to get the publisher to stop circulating it—to erase that information. Look it up on Amazon.

I learned that there is dangerous information. There are ‘Secret Family Recipes.’ Uncommon knowledge. The tools that nourish also destroy.”

About the Artist

Scott Horsley’s paintings and drawings have appeared nationally in solo and group shows, with recent shows in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and San Diego. Scott is represented by Bert Green Fine Art in Chicago where his most recent solo show, March of Progress, was held in 2015.

Scott received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego and his BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Scott is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of drawing and painting at Weber State University.