SCOTT KOLBO
www.scottkolbo.com skolbo@whitworth.edu

Artist's Biography:
Scott Kolbo was born in Othello Washington in 1972, grew up in Boise Idaho, and later moved to Seattle. He became obsessed with art after spending countless hours sketching on the back of the church bulletin as a kid and drawing continues to play a dominant role in all his work. After living and going to college in the Seattle/Portland area he moved back to Boise to study Art. He became interested in the tradition of satire by looking through art books in the library and realizing that he was most attracted to prints with funny looking people in them. He was fortunate to enroll in a printmaking class with Professor George Roberts, an innovator in non-toxic printmaking and a wonderful mentor. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Boise State University in 1996. The University of Wisconsin-Madison brought Scott into the graduate program in studio art on a fellowship in 1997, and he taught beginning and advanced drawing for the department as a teaching assistant from 1998-2000. As a part of his graduate work he worked for a short while at Tandem Press, a university based print workshop, and was exposed to many important contemporary artists. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000. He currently lives in Spokane Washington with his family and works as a Professor at Whitworth University. Scott teaches a variety of classes in the Whitworth Art Department including; Printmaking, Design, Computer Graphics, and Contemporary Art History. His interests revolve around the study of culture, aesthetics, literature, film, and the tension between religious faith and contemporary art. In his studio art work he is interested in the incorporation of new technologies into traditional art making strategies and mixing together elements from high and low culture. Scott exhibits his work locally, nationally, and in web-based formats.

Artist's Statement:
I believe that despite our best efforts to look important, rational, and dignified, we all make fools of ourselves in the end. Human nature is corrupted by folly, and even our best intentions are subverted by our mixed motivations. My work is an investigation into the ways that this phenomenon manifests itself in individual lives and in society as a whole. I create a world where reality mixes with exaggeration, absurdity, and the grotesque in an attempt to expose and deflate the distortions that pass for truths in our media-soaked and self-absorbed culture. My ultimate goal is to lead the viewer to recognize the fundamental foolishness of human nature and to make visible the discrepancies that exist between what we pretend to be and what we really are.