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<\/em> carrying to the dump garbage bag after garbage bag filled with other people\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Douglas-Scholes_TerribleBeauties\"$
Douglas Scholes<\/strong>
Terrible Beauties<\/em>, exhibition view, McClure Gallery of the Visual Arts Centre, Montr\u00e9al, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of McClure Gallery of the Visual Arts Centre, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In a short, improvised video, the flaneur<\/em> spins in place with pylons pinned to both ears like cartoonish hearing devices. His dizzying pirouette and ultimate collapse evoke a video-game character, its life expiring. As Scholes describes it, the indefatigable hero has been overwhelmed not by work but by the sheer din of it all\u200a\u2014\u200athe trucks trucking and bulldozers bulldozing and all of it blowing him down like another scrap of trash lost to the heap. It\u2019s as much a call to arms as a collapse. Our hero needs backup, pronto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Douglas-Scholes\"$
Douglas Scholes<\/strong>
Terrible Beauties<\/em>, exhibition views, McClure Gallery of the Visual Arts Centre, Montr\u00e9al, 2022.
Photos: courtesy of McClure Gallery of the Visual Arts Centre, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Douglas-Scholes\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Several of Scholes\u2019s works are for sale, and his framed photographs of plastic flotsam urge us to consider them for our homes. Do we dare? The show\u2019s lone painting, a junk-shop find depicting a picturesque forest, was acquired by a collector shortly before the exhibition closed. In the piece, Scholes has adhered a small frame to a portion of the larger canvas, cordoning off an unsullied area of water, mountain, and sky. But outside that pretty vista, onto a strip of shoreline, is glued a large, hideous scrap of plastic, marring the scene. Perhaps more than the Everests of plastic depicted in the videos, this lone wad of junk on an eyesore of a painting with not one but two frames is the ultimate indictment of excess. Was the collector merely an undiscerning fan of kitsch pictures or was this purchase an act of solidarity? Either way, one hopes the sale will slide a fresh quarter into Scholes\u2019s video game, renewing once again the hero\u2019s quest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An assistant director at Blouin Division, Tyler Benedict also writes for galleries and auction houses, focusing on Canadian contemporary art.<\/p>\n
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