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Scoli Acosta 2006

April 14, 2006- May 20, 2006

Scoli Acosta

Daniel Reich Gallery

537A W 23rd St

Daniel Reich Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Scoli Acosta. Based on the play between dawn and dusk in the Terrence Mallik film Badlands (1973), Acosta’s ...day was to fall as night was to break... portrays the American landscape in ways both metaphoric and realistic. Through the excavation of natural, personal, social, and political histories, Acosta’s work exposes a dislocated landscape infused with darkness, sadness, perplexity, and isolation. The displacement of this landscape is paralleled by Acosta’s use of fragments from “Land of the Lost” alluding to the T.V. series in which a father, son and sister on a family hiking trip enter through a “time doorway,” a non specific era in Earth’s history, an enigmatic zone whose geographic location and time remain unknown.

As Acosta writes:

I wanted to be able to put external scenes and internal “insight” onto the same piece of paper. These are paintings from inside the viewer, they function as portholes from within a physical space and render a collective body. I usually describe the framework as being sunglasses or nightshades, nightshade both referring the family of plant as well as the fabric shades one places over the eyes in ambient light, in order to obtain total blackness for sleep. The reference to sunglasses and nightshades also singles out the sense of sight or the place from which one sees, the eyes of course being negligible in a state of sleep.

Largely based on narrative structure, an associative and intuitive system of logic, and alchemistic approaches to the art making process, Acosta’s works, created using a wide spectrum of media, fuse with traditional structures of perspective and light to create vast landscapes of worlds within. In Acosta’s Šday was to fall as night was to break..., seemingly disparate and vastly dispersed symbols form a cryptogram, giving dynamism to a circuit of enigmatic symbols. This formation recalls an almost Joyce like approach to the conveyance of meaning. In a large aluminum pail collaged with a plethora of images and headlines from a single day’s news in the LA Times, a dispersion of events both horrific and mundane, can be seen in parallel to the time line of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The film Badlands presents the viewer with a reoccurrence of certain objects, namely Daybreak, an extremely popular print by artist Maxfield Parrish (Sissy Spacek is seen carrying this print throughout her meaninglessly violent journey with co-star Martin Sheen. It is Spacek’s experience that Acosta makes the centerpiece of this installation in the video “Sissyeyes.” Additionally, components present in the installation such as a tiffany lamp shade explosion and an abstracted moonshine still, suggest a nostalgic portrait of America during depression years. The Parrish print inspires a calm and blissful reverie during a period of struggle and despair for many, which Acosta transfers into his melancholic and dream like internalized landscapes.

Emulating the symbolism and structure within Mallik’s film while entirely omitting the idea of a plot line, Acosta applies similar devices in the construction of his installation. We find a track recalling a journey or travel, a “road” employed as a device that carries the viewer through the work. Similarly, a transparent cube composed of porch and patio screening is abstractly modeled after an automobile, so sparely that it also recalls the report of a car bomb explosion on the LA Times covered pail. Blurring associations between a scale model of land and a complex invention, the installation presents itself as being both utilitarian and dysfunctional. A poodle composed of popcorn and wood is situated at the front of the exhibition, appearing as the show’s sentinel. Initially bred and trimmed to aid in the retrieval of animals in water (the classic puffy fur originally aided in floatation and propulsion, while the shaved areas of the animal decrease drag and thus increase speed), the present day poodle now exists as a humorous amalgam - purpose rendered superfluous.

Acosta has recently been featured in The New Yorker, Frieze and Flash Art, and he will be included in the upcoming California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. A Deep Pudddle & Piquillo ou le Reve de Mr. Hulule, a catalog of Acosta’s three year project in Paris, has recently been published.

Books and DVDs related to artists in this show

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