The Reef

Artist Statement

"I make paintings that are about the future. And the future for many of us will include rising tides becoming a much more uncomfortable part of our day-to-day lives. The future always seems so far away, but that's the thing about the future: slowly but surely, it creeps up on us, and before you know it, the present is actually the future. The future in my paintings is often informed by popular culture - the idea we collectively have in our head of what the future might look like from all the movies and TV shows we've watched and the books and movies we've read. This is what we think the future will look like, and we often feel resigned to it, but that's the other thing about the future. The time to change it is now. I hope that by making paintings about the future, we can look at them and think, "You know, maybe the future shouldn't look like that." Does that make me somewhat secretly an optimist? I guess it does."

- Scott Listfield

Artist Bio

Scott Listfield is known for his paintings featuring a lone exploratory astronaut lost in a landscape cluttered with pop culture icons, corporate logos, and tongue-in-cheek science fiction references. Scott grew up in Boston and studied art at Dartmouth College. After some time spent living abroad, Scott returned to America and, after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, began painting astronauts and, sometimes, dinosaurs. He now lives and works in Los Angeles.

Scott regularly exhibits his work in galleries and museums around the world. His paintings have been profiled in Juxtapoz, Wired Magazine, and The Boston Globe, and in 2018 the first book on his work was published by Paragon Books.