Scott Listfield's tongue-in-cheek paintings of a lone astronaut wandering around a London 'divided' by Brexit

For his previous show at StolenSpace Gallery in London, Scott Listfield created a series of paintings where his character explored a lost or parallel London from the '90s.

The show was about London's past, its present, and about Scott's two-decade-old love affair with British music and culture from that time. And then, right after that exhibition closed, Brexit happened.

"Of course, I'm an American and am pretty ill-equipped to make intelligent statements on anything that has been going on in UK politics," Scott told Creative Boom. "And so, for my second episode at StolenSpace, I didn't want to make a show that was literally about Brexit. But it all feels eerily similar to political and cultural movements that have recently been dividing people here in the US and in many other places around the world.

"And the more I thought about it, it was that divide, the one between regular people and those in power, the left and right, the old and young, the extremely wealthy and everybody else, the skewing of what's real and fake – it was those things which I couldn't stop thinking about. It feels like we're all teetering on the edge of a great divide, with everyone fearful of both the present and the future."

His latest series, Divided: An Astronaut Story, features tongue-in-cheek paintings split in half with a hard line, where two separate worlds appear to be connecting or disconnecting.

Scott continues: "I've used the landscape and architecture of modern London as a kind of language between those two worlds. The lone, singular astronaut who appears in each of my paintings explores this fractured place. Sometimes slipping between the two and sometimes stuck in one half, able to see both partitions but unable to make sense of the two halves together."

Divided: An Astronaut Story is now open at StolenSpace in London, and will be on display until 7 July 2019. Discover more of Scott Listfield's work at astronautdinosaur.com.