Visual Art Review from Chapel Hill News, Sunday, February 11, 1996

SCOTT EAGLE'S WORKS EXPLORE MYTH, RELIGION

by Michele Natale/ Art Works

Scott Eagle's work, on display at Carrboro's Artcenter through Feb. 27 in a show titled "I am Icarus," finally delivers to that venue everything one could ask for in a satisfying viewing experience: excellent technique, visual coherence and challenging content.

The 33-year-old artist is a master of fine arts graduate of East Carolina University currently teaching there. This show features paintings and drawings created over the past two years, several of which have won major awards in important area shows. In addition, Eagle was included in Duke University Museum of Art's "New Art in the Triangle" show in 1995.

Eagle's works are devoted to the exploration of myth, religion, and personal psychology conveyed by fine draughtsmanship, appropriated imagery and his own brand of surrealism.

Quoting from artists such as Leonardo and Breughel, yet far from merely copying these masters, Eagle combines these images with modern techniques, such as collage and color Xeroxing, and his own symbolism, infusing them with new meaning. In "Madonna and Fish," Eagle takes the conventional representation of the Madonna and child and turns it on end. The Madonna gazing lovingly into the eyes of a fish at first appears surreal with comic overtones. However, when one recognizes the fish as a traditional symbol for Christ, we understand that Eagle has substituted the Christ child for its equivalent.

The tornado is a core image in Eagle's art, literally taken from his own recurrent dreams, representing events which seem to come out of nowhere, altering our lives with unexpected force and intensity.

In "The Power of Babble," images from Brueghel depicting the Tower of Babel are color copied, cut up and reassembled into the whirling funnel of a tornado touching ground in an apocalyptic landscape. For Eagle, this tornado-tower hints at the immense potential destructive power of universal communication via modern technology, thus likening the information highway to the biblical Tower.

Even in the image of an angel quoted from Leonardo in "A Prayer for My Father," the circular whorls that emanate from the classically rendered drapery and blur the figure's face suggesting a vortex, adding an unexpected disquieting feeling to the drawing.

A series of monoprints altered with prismacolor titled "The Icarus Series" illustrate Eagle's own unique reinterpretation of that myth. Here, Eagle imagines Icarus, like Christ, is transformed and reborn, instead of dying, after his fall from the sky.

These mysterious pictures require some extra viewing effort that will be well rewarded, for they display an internal logic that is convincingly carried through in Eagle's vocabulary of personal symbols.