The Field is All Around Us: Scott Sueme’s Solo at Uprise Art Will Change How You See Space
In Scott Sueme’s latest collaboration with Uprise Art, the artist asks, “If you are called to look, what do you see?” In fact, I pose the question to you right now. As you lie in bed reading this when you really should be asleep or as you doomscroll art news to avoid doomscrolling national news, Sueme calls you to look with the consideration of someone devoted to noticing the breath within the breath, the moment within the moment.
Taking inspiration from the Floris McLaren poem Field in the Wind (after which the show and one piece is titled), Sueme parts the opaque curtain of the invisible—what we might dismiss as emptiness—to reveal the presence of complex relationships, microscopic biomes, and other earth marvels. Inspired by the collective respect for nature and Indigenous imagery in British Colombia, Canada, second-generation artist Scott Sueme asks us to investigate areas and phenomena we often perceive as empty or blank: the vast potential of “The Field,” the unseen presence of “The Wind.” Sueme’s work holds on to these open places that fall thin and sparkling through our fingers, slippery, as time can often feel.
The exhibition Field in The Wind incorporates three bodies of work, sharing a dialogue between interior landscapes and a shifting, rearranging outer world that exists within the artist and his studio. The beginning of his investigations seem to be his gridded works on paper, titled collectively as Raw Data, which emerged from his 2023 Uprise Art x MacArthur Residency in Sonoma, California. These pieces, individually painted on cut paper, are arranged and rearranged like the sigils of an arcane summoner, revealing hidden meanings that whisper beneath their surfaces. This process of ordering and reordering allows Sueme to explore how fragmented elements can be sewn together into larger, resonant narratives and structures.
Although Sueme brings his own interpretations to these compositions, the abstracted but recognizable symbols within them live beyond his personal history. They function as an open-ended visual language, inviting each viewer to listen for the whispers of their own meanings. Raw Data engages with the fundamental abstraction of language and symbols—its capacity to both perfectly express and willfully withhold—an ally and, at times, an adversary. Just as words hold their own agency, shifting in meaning depending on context and reception, so do his painted forms.
In a recent departure from his grided works, Sueme introduces a series of field paintings—an exercise in dense emptiness. These paintings, with their wiggling and vibrating greens, evoke the sensation of rippling grass under a breeze, a natural space that appears simple from afar but teems with energy up close. The fields, punctuated by the occasional bloom, are both overlapping and purposefully separate, generating within us a quiet tension as we recognize each blade as an individual, her own collector of moments.
With the introduction of these field paintings, the artist’s thematic interest in the spaces between truly reveals itself. The gaps separating compartmentalized thoughts feel fuller, enriched by Sueme’s quiet insistence that emptiness is never truly empty. He has trained us to see absence with intention—to recognize the sparkles of dust in a sunbeam, the weight of a pause, the grass “running in the wind without a sound.” As Sasha, Uprise’s gallery dog, basks in a warm patch of light, we are reminded that presence exists within all spaces, seen and unseen. The yellow egg yolk sun, white-hot against the icy expanse of the painting Blue Pond, compels a reconsideration of even the invisible heat of sunlight that leaves tiny purple circles burned into your eyes. Or this tight square of light you’re holding right now, the smudge or crack that you’ve trained yourself to see past.
The show Field in The Wind encourages us to listen for the call to notice. Sueme’s art does not demand answers or inspired forceful action regarding what you may find. This is not an interrogation but rather a loving lingering gaze, a listening ear sans airpod, that “runs and runs, until the wind is still.”
Field in The Wind by Floris McLaren
The grass is running in the wind
Without a sound,
Crouching and smooth and fast
Along the ground.
The clouds run too,
And little shadows play
And scurry in the grass
That will not stay,
But runs and runs, until
The wind is still.
Field In The Wind, a solo exhibition of new work by Scott Sueme runs through May 23, 2025 @uprisenyc
About the writer: Terra Keck is an artist and performer based in Brooklyn, New York. Keck received her MFA from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and her BFA from Ball State University. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper and Artefuse. Notable Exhibitions include a solo booth with Field Projects at SPRING/BREAK, Subliminal projects, MAIA Contemporary in Mexico City, Sun Contemporary in Bali, and Purslane in the UK. Her work can be found in permanent collections in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, California, and Italy.