Scoli Acosta
14 Apr - 20 May 2006
SCOLI ACOSTA
...Day was to fall as night was to break...
April 14 - May 20, 2006
Opening Reception Friday, April 14, 6 - 8 pm
Daniel Reich Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Scoli Acosta. Based on the Terrence Mallik film Badlands (1973) with its affectless Sissy Spacek narration, which chronicles a journey of outlaws Kit and Holly “...Day was to fall as night was to break...” utilizes the play between dawn and dusk, and the body as being both vehicle and limit. In Mallik’s film, Kit, a disaffected garbage man, and Holly, a school student, zigzag across America ahead of the law. Acosta’s ...day was to fall as night was to break... portrays an in-between American landscape of the metaphorical and pertinently circuitous. For instance, “Exploding Chassis Moonshine Still,” a sculpture on a winding track, references the nocturnal prohibition moonshine distilleries in the 1920s. Formally, the work concludes in a bucket papered with the February 26, 2006 issue of the LA Times, where the alcoholic vapor that composes Moonshine condenses back into fluid, suggesting the mind numbing residue read at leisure in comfortable homes and commuter trains across the land. Conversely pertinent, the sculpture is a minimalist parallelogram made from porch and patio screening, representing a car exploding from within, collapsed precariously upon a crushed wheel as the LA Times reports a “car bombing.” This sculpture points to America’s abundant crop, corn (present in Popcorn Poodle, the base ingredient in moonshine, which is also a material used in ethanol, an alternative fuel). Reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s interest in geometry and natural science in correlation to the American landscape, Acosta’s work maintains human intervention as part of the natural process (the use of Fossil Fuel and Ethanol come to mind). Through such excavations of natural, personal, social, and political histories, Acosta creates a dislocated, albeit specific landscape, infused with darkness and perplexity.
As Acosta notes as to his point of view:
The vehicle of the narrative is the vehicle.
The vehicle as an emblem of America.
And continues:
[The] paintings are 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, nightshades both referring to the family of plants as well as the fabric shades worn at night to aid in falling asleep. These references also single out the sense of sight or the place from which one sees, the eyes of course being negligible in a state of sleep
Acosta uses particular salvaged material within the traditional framework of perspective and light, to create associative, sweeping landscapes, using a cryptography of symbols: the wheel, circle, ellipse, the ocular shapes of a night-time blindfold, disembodied hands, plants, rocks etc. This cryptography lends dynamism to a circuit materialized in Acosta’s track relating to the on and off road journey of Kit and Holly in Badlands: recalling an almost Joyce like approach to the expression of a journey. The reference to a Moonshine still both reflects the distillation of an artistic idea, and the prohibited moonlit operation setting forth a play with historical perceptions of “night:” mythological and pseudo-scientific associations with the feminine energy of the moon, superstition, magic, and lunacy. The Exploding Chassis Moonshine Still, in conjunction with the vehicle car bomb, is an open question of the possibility and viability of alternative fuels for vehicles such as ethanol, a form of alcohol made from corn. Acosta uses the vehicle as an emblem of America and questions the usage of its agricultural landscape for new cycles of energy.
Watched closely, Badlands presents the viewer with the reoccurrence of two objects salvaged from Holly’s burning home: a Tiffany-esque lamp reflected in Acosta’s trinity of lamps in the front room and Daybreak (also included in Acosta’s lamps) and a Maxfield Parrish print extremely popular during the depression era. It is Spacek’s experience that Acosta makes a second elliptical center of the installation in the video “Sissyeyes”: A corporal view of the ephemeral (the body without a mirror), moments of pleasure, and reinvention within affectlessness. The soundtrack for “Sissyeyes” is once again an6 in-between: the sound of space dirt brushing the Cassini Space craft as it passes through the rings of Saturn. The Parish print inspired a calm and blissful reverie during a period of despair for many, a period that parallels current events: the energy crisis, the Middle East, and a general feeling of political and cultural emptiness, becoming a platform where predicament meets kinetic possibility, expressed by the collapsed wheel of “Exploding Chassis Moonshine Still” poised on its track to pivot.
And yet... blurring associations between a scale model of land and complex invention, the installation presents itself as being both utilitarian and dysfunctional. Here we might simply take the ambiguous title of a drawing “Tarred and Feathered (or the enabling humility which this might be)...” as reflected in the Pop iconographic “Popcorn Poodle,” the sentinel of the exhibition made from popped corn (once again relating back to moonshine and ethanol). Bred and trimmed for the retrieval of animals in water (the classic poofey fur facilitated floatation and propulsion, while shaved areas decreased drag, increasing velocity), yet the present day poodle is a humorous amalgam - purpose rendered a sign of superfluidity.
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 Puddle & Piquillo ou le Reve de Mr. Hulule, a catalog of Acosta’s three-year project in Paris, has recently been published.
...Day was to fall as night was to break...
April 14 - May 20, 2006
Opening Reception Friday, April 14, 6 - 8 pm
Daniel Reich Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Scoli Acosta. Based on the Terrence Mallik film Badlands (1973) with its affectless Sissy Spacek narration, which chronicles a journey of outlaws Kit and Holly “...Day was to fall as night was to break...” utilizes the play between dawn and dusk, and the body as being both vehicle and limit. In Mallik’s film, Kit, a disaffected garbage man, and Holly, a school student, zigzag across America ahead of the law. Acosta’s ...day was to fall as night was to break... portrays an in-between American landscape of the metaphorical and pertinently circuitous. For instance, “Exploding Chassis Moonshine Still,” a sculpture on a winding track, references the nocturnal prohibition moonshine distilleries in the 1920s. Formally, the work concludes in a bucket papered with the February 26, 2006 issue of the LA Times, where the alcoholic vapor that composes Moonshine condenses back into fluid, suggesting the mind numbing residue read at leisure in comfortable homes and commuter trains across the land. Conversely pertinent, the sculpture is a minimalist parallelogram made from porch and patio screening, representing a car exploding from within, collapsed precariously upon a crushed wheel as the LA Times reports a “car bombing.” This sculpture points to America’s abundant crop, corn (present in Popcorn Poodle, the base ingredient in moonshine, which is also a material used in ethanol, an alternative fuel). Reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s interest in geometry and natural science in correlation to the American landscape, Acosta’s work maintains human intervention as part of the natural process (the use of Fossil Fuel and Ethanol come to mind). Through such excavations of natural, personal, social, and political histories, Acosta creates a dislocated, albeit specific landscape, infused with darkness and perplexity.
As Acosta notes as to his point of view:
The vehicle of the narrative is the vehicle.
The vehicle as an emblem of America.
And continues:
[The] paintings are 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, nightshades both referring to the family of plants as well as the fabric shades worn at night to aid in falling asleep. These references also single out the sense of sight or the place from which one sees, the eyes of course being negligible in a state of sleep
Acosta uses particular salvaged material within the traditional framework of perspective and light, to create associative, sweeping landscapes, using a cryptography of symbols: the wheel, circle, ellipse, the ocular shapes of a night-time blindfold, disembodied hands, plants, rocks etc. This cryptography lends dynamism to a circuit materialized in Acosta’s track relating to the on and off road journey of Kit and Holly in Badlands: recalling an almost Joyce like approach to the expression of a journey. The reference to a Moonshine still both reflects the distillation of an artistic idea, and the prohibited moonlit operation setting forth a play with historical perceptions of “night:” mythological and pseudo-scientific associations with the feminine energy of the moon, superstition, magic, and lunacy. The Exploding Chassis Moonshine Still, in conjunction with the vehicle car bomb, is an open question of the possibility and viability of alternative fuels for vehicles such as ethanol, a form of alcohol made from corn. Acosta uses the vehicle as an emblem of America and questions the usage of its agricultural landscape for new cycles of energy.
Watched closely, Badlands presents the viewer with the reoccurrence of two objects salvaged from Holly’s burning home: a Tiffany-esque lamp reflected in Acosta’s trinity of lamps in the front room and Daybreak (also included in Acosta’s lamps) and a Maxfield Parrish print extremely popular during the depression era. It is Spacek’s experience that Acosta makes a second elliptical center of the installation in the video “Sissyeyes”: A corporal view of the ephemeral (the body without a mirror), moments of pleasure, and reinvention within affectlessness. The soundtrack for “Sissyeyes” is once again an6 in-between: the sound of space dirt brushing the Cassini Space craft as it passes through the rings of Saturn. The Parish print inspired a calm and blissful reverie during a period of despair for many, a period that parallels current events: the energy crisis, the Middle East, and a general feeling of political and cultural emptiness, becoming a platform where predicament meets kinetic possibility, expressed by the collapsed wheel of “Exploding Chassis Moonshine Still” poised on its track to pivot.
And yet... blurring associations between a scale model of land and complex invention, the installation presents itself as being both utilitarian and dysfunctional. Here we might simply take the ambiguous title of a drawing “Tarred and Feathered (or the enabling humility which this might be)...” as reflected in the Pop iconographic “Popcorn Poodle,” the sentinel of the exhibition made from popped corn (once again relating back to moonshine and ethanol). Bred and trimmed for the retrieval of animals in water (the classic poofey fur facilitated floatation and propulsion, while shaved areas decreased drag, increasing velocity), yet the present day poodle is a humorous amalgam - purpose rendered a sign of superfluidity.
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 Puddle & Piquillo ou le Reve de Mr. Hulule, a catalog of Acosta’s three-year project in Paris, has recently been published.