Scout Zabinski
(New Jersey, 1997)
Scout Zabinski (b. 1997, New Jersey) is a self-taught visual artist/painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Zabinski’s work explores her own history with trauma through what she terms psychological self portraiture. Her paintings navigate themes of body image, the male gaze, and everyday life while alluding to weighted secrets of abuse and addiction. These nude life-scale “Scout’s” invert the gaze into a two-way parlay, a means of self-reclamation and preservation. Each painting begins as a photoshopped image made on her iPhone, based on memory and the subconscious via assemblage. The repetitive nude figures dares the viewers to engage as a voyeur and friend, mirroring life in its trauma and beauty while maintaining a sense of playfulness. Vulnerable and tender, she disrobes her mind and body as a form of therapy and meditation.
She holds a BA from the Gallatin School at NYU, where she studied psychology, postcolonial feminism, art history and literature.