Scott R. McMaster, a Newfoundland-born artist, is a versatile creator whose artistic odyssey began in high school, armed only with a beat-up old Ricoh camera devoid of a light meter. From these humble beginnings, he honed his craft and embraced photography as his primary medium of expression.
Scott’s artistic footprint extends across the globe, with exhibitions spanning Asia, Canada, the United States, and Europe. His early works delve into abstract landscapes of waste, tracing the devolution of man-made materials, challenging viewers’ perceptions of narrative and traditional beauty. In more recent times, his artistic exploration has evolved, delving into the tapestry of visual culture, where it intersects with people, streets, and the often overlooked or mundane aspects of life. His creative journey has been significantly influenced and invigorated by living in Hong Kong, a city teeming with inspiration.
His recent exhibits include finalist in the Kuala Lumpur Portrait Awards, Singapore Art Week, Trieste Photo Days, Rotterdam International Photography Festival, Art Macau, and the Hong Kong International Photography Festival. These international platforms have allowed Scott to bring his unique perspective to a global audience, demonstrating a profound ability to connect with viewers and offer fresh insights into the world through his lens.
Research
Most recently Scott was awarded the Early Career Scheme grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council for his project entitled “No Heritage Found on Map: the Vanishing Villages of Hong Kong”, a 3 year visual ethnographic study focused on the traditional precolonial Hakka homes of the North Eastern New Territories of Hong Kong.
His doctoral research involved the use of crowd sourcing technologies and image-based research to explore the effects of globalization. Studying imagery from around the world through the lens of popular visual culture he hopes to reveal strategies for teaching visual literacy and ways to integrate the critical assessment of visual culture into formal and informal learning environments.
Art
Scott’s main body of contemporary photographic art is notable for their abstract nature and lack of titles. He purposefully leaves them ‘untitled’ so that he does not impose his interpretations on those viewing the artwork. They only bear the numbers from scanning machines and digital cameras; these are left so that they can be identified yet still remaining relatively non-coercive. He enjoys hearing the narratives that people share while encountering his art, so ‘Untitled’ leaves them with a certain neutrality and approach-ability, thus open to countless interpretations and invigorating our imaginations.
More recently he has begun several new portfolios of work inspired by his new surroundings in Hong Kong and taken up the challenges of documentary-style street photography, documenting the vanishing traditional village homes of Taipo and time-scale projects that deal with intersections of the urban and natural environment. All of these new streams of visual exploration have at their core a visual sociological/ arts-based approach and seek to simultaneously explore these topics with a defined aesthetic while emphasizing the visual as an important alternative form of knowledge and mode of understanding our world.
The images on this site are a mixture of traditional analogue film photography, professional digital as well as camera phones.