NEW YORK, NY.- At times, the contextual relation of the human to urban society is a deceptively generalized one—a simple result of time and circumstance removed from how it evolved towards uncategorizable extents. As always, yet particularly in our contemporary age of a long, undeserved American peacetime which has begun to crumble, it is increasingly critical to reorient ourselves towards such built environments. No condo is a given. There is much work to be done. There are many buildings to be reimagined. As a polymath, William Scott has spent the past few decades bouncing between scales and forms. Take for example—at once as monumental as the fantastical kingdoms of old and as quaint as could be contained by the screen of an iPad—his digital renderings of the grandiose, precise structures he aptly describes as “classic, new buildings.” As viewers, we encounter them from a bird's eye view as our dutiful tour guide silently grants shifting angles of the developments.

A few especially important spaces appear, such as the red-brick, castle-like collection of irregular cruciforms and window-filled lookout cylinders with conical roofs fashioned somewhere between minarets and water towers. These secured premises are home to the Scar Removal Center at The Skin Factory. These buildings are a nod to Scott’s own biography, as he was a childhood burn victim who spent a lengthy period recovering at the San Francisco General Hospital (a space also elaborately featured in his Praise Frisco). His process of critically taking on the past in order to influence the future constitutes a reparative archeology of self. It is a process which also serves as feedback to decorate and embellish our understanding of place, inviting us to assemble new puzzles with old pieces. Scott is a one-man contact zone1, and his world is his artifact.

It would be an over-simplification to describe Praise Frisco as a utopian reimagining of San Francisco, as it is not simply a place in which mishaps do not occur, but rather a place where they are mended. It is imagined chiefly within the realm of plausible Reality. The renovations of the Real city are, in fact, sometimes presented in past tense, (such as those described in the text drawing San Francisco General Hospital Demolished The Old Buildings Hires The Classic Style Brick Buildings, n.d.). Stated plainly, Praise Frisco is a science non-fiction. That is to say, Praise Frisco is San Francisco, but not your San Francisco; Praise Frisco is a land of God, but not your land of God. Praise Frisco is Hollywood and the Bahamas. Scott’s Christians are those who honor the needy and unhoused, and their churches are the sanctuaries of Praise Frisco.

Scott is the architect of a meta-space wading in constant contingency upon those who truly create it. And those creators are made explicitly available to us—the people of Praise Frisco: Monique, brightly grinning with her pink hoops and matching Sunday best; grooving, jiving, humorous, peaceful, wholesome citizens of the SFO (Skyline Friendly Organization); darlings and studs of afros, velvet pantsuits, and Apple Bottom jeans whom I may have seen posing for Shine’N’Jam containers; figures you may recall as Marvin and Tammi, Diana Ross, Oprah, or Janet Jackson. These portraits, often lit with beaming rays of nightly skyscrapers and soaring SFO Citizen Ships, engage with the reconstructive capacity of representation. By graphically joining black and brown neighborhoods (Disneywood, Orlando Heights, Gospeltown Hood, etc.) with entertainment figures who have impacted his life and experience of the world, Scott inextricably links sociocultural aspects of community and the sites in which they take place. Scott’s pictorialist portraiture—treated as graphic reconstruction—notably recalls the visual language of posters and murals, historical artforms which are inherently intertwined with the sociocultural, particularly in areas where the use of public space for the dissemination of collectivized ideals is an important method for the production of creative output and the communal engagement which follows.

This reconstruction also figures lively in Scott’s architectural drawings, which often feature (and sometimes are composed purely of) captions and notes. See corridors and gridded facades, see rectilinear polygons who call back ghosts. Hear, for example, the nascent echo of Alice Griffith, who co-founded the inaugural Housing Association of San Francisco and whose efforts within the judicial system helped better the living conditions of tenement-dwelling immigrants. Hear, for example, addresses and proposals to “Cooper Hewitt,” whose mention perhaps serves as a stand-in for philanthropy or inherited stewardship.

“What separates toy models from models is not just that they are simplified enough to enable us to tinker with the internal theoretical structure of a model, but that they are explicit metatheories. All theories are metatheories, but within regular theoretical models metatheoretical assumptions are usually implicit or hidden, whereas toy models are explicitly metatheoretical and in fact the simplification (what gives them the name ‘toy’, a tinkermodel) serves as a strategy for bringing hidden metatheoretical assumptions out into the open by tinkering with the internal variables of the model without getting bogged down in theoretical details.”2

The oeuvre of Scott is a toy model which, in his words, is an “alternative guide to the universe.” Through his various interwoven and highly calculated endeavors, the metatheoretical narrativization of his distance(s) to and from the world offer poignant tools for challenging the concrete.

— Zaid Arshad

William Scott (b. 1964, San Francisco, California) is a self-taught artist, who has practiced at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, CA since 1992. Scott’s practice imagines alternative realities that stem from a fundamental belief in the potential for positive human transformation.

Scott has had solo exhibitions at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden; Studio Voltaire, London; White Columns, New York; Ortuzar Projects, New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery and the Museum of Everything, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; BAMPFA, Berkeley; White Columns, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, and Ricco Maresca, New York; and Gallery Paule Anglim, Minnesota Street Project, and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; Oakland Museum of California; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

1 The theory of the contact zone was developed by Mary Louise Pratt, who articulates it as a place where different cultures overlap and interact in various ways, resulting in the creation of another identity not quite part of and yet not quite outside of its constituents. “Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression: these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone. Miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning: these are some of the perils of writing in the contact zone.” Mary Louise Pratt. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Pro(ession, 1991, pp. 33–40. /5TO9, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469.

2 Reza Negarestani, “Intelligence and Spirit.” Urbanomic/5equence Press, 2018, pp. 124-125.