Scott Troxel
I am a Philadelphia-area-based abstract artist. From an early age, I have been obsessed with modern art, color and design. I earned a degree from Temple University in Filmmaking. After working in the furniture industry, then later as a graphic artist and a product development manager, I decided to pursue my art fulltime in my early 40s. I have been a full-time artist for the last five years. A majority of my work has been in the form of wood mixed media wall sculpture, as I feel I can best express myself with this three dimensional medium. My work has been collected internationally and is in the collections of most major hotels chains and several Fortune 500 companies.
I predominately work with wood as my base medium, due to its strength, dimension and organic nature. The inherent texture of wood combined with paint and other man made materials allow me to explore the concepts of old and young, worn versus new, organic versus man-made and the past versus the present and future. I look to capture a sense of time in my work and often combine the feeling of different eras within a single piece. I see this as a direct parallel with human life, as we too grow older and interact with other generations, both younger and older.
I am also particularly interested in items that were considered technologically or aesthetically advanced, only to be passed on by the consistency and tenacity of time. I try to draw on the aesthetics of bygone technology and the forward-looking designs of the Atomic Age and mid-century modernism to make dynamic, retro-futurist wooden sculptures that evoke nostalgia for the past as much as they look to the future. I am fascinated by the way pieces of technology, culture, and design reveal their age, I aim to make works that cannot be pinned to a specific era.
I particularly inspired by mid-century modernism, where wood and organic shapes were combined with other materials to suggest a type of futurism, though now they are considered vintage. Time has passed on but these pieces remain in that context of when they were designed. I want my work feel this way, somewhat nostalgic, aged and organic with the feeling that it could also be from a future time.