?! Careyes Foundation
10850 Wilshire Blvd Ste 100
Los Angeles CA 90024
USA
The Contemporary Art and Community International Artist Residency Program
In the summer of 2015, Scoli Acosta’s residency in Careyes inspired a new body of performative objects, sculptures, paintings and video, culminating in an exhibition entitled The Jungle Meets the Sea.
The exhibition begins with a yellow monochrome surrounded by hand-cut paper moths from the region glued directly to the gallery wall. Working collaboratively with Gustavo Vargas, a local craftsman in Zapata, the artist created a site-specific security window sculpture, installed inside the gallery space both to frame the flora and fauna of the landscape behind the window and, paradoxically, to “protect” the outside from the inside.
Responding to the architectural and landscape interventions of Careyes’s founder and family, Overlapping Ritualistic Systems is a large-scale mixed media work centered around a graphite rubbing of a labyrinth outside of the artist’s studio. Literally transferred this way, the ornamental labyrinth speaks to the artist’s interest in the processes of translation and abstraction of historical and cultural referents (he notes its original location is the Chartres cathedral in France). This graphite and acrylic work on canvas of an architectural scale has water bottles sewn around the perimeter of the piece and will be performed, put out to sea, and reinstalled. Next to the labyrinth among the paving stones is Dante’s popularly quoted text from the Divine Comedy: “Nel mezzo del cammin….,” (“In the middle of the journey….”), which he’s painted and turned into a climbing wall in the gallery.
The crux of the exhibition is an installation that was the product of Acosta’s collaboration with 41 school children from the San Mateo elementary school: a sculptural pyramid composed of handmade kites that were tied together, flown on the beach, and will be given back to the students at the end of the exhibition.
This new body of work speaks to Acosta’s particular brand of alchemy—finding beauty in detritus, transforming the quotidian into the poetic, and gesturing to objects subject to metamorphosis via the elements.
About the artist
Scoli Acosta was born in 1973 in Los Angeles, where he lives and works. He studied fine art at the Kansas City Art Institute (1994) and the Ultimate Akademie in Cologne, Germany (1997). Recent exhibitions include: Fernelmont Contemporary Art, Château de Fernelmont, Belgium (2014); Vernacular Alchemists, Passerelle, Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, France (2014); Les horizons, La Criée, Rennes, France (2014); Music of Morocco, Galerie Laurent Godin Paris (2013); Elementhalismus, MCASD Downtown (2013); MADE IN L.A. 2012, organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LA><ART (2012); Drawings and Projects, FRAC Basse-Normandie (2011); Carbon Footprint, Galerie Laurent Godin Paris (2008); Bountiful, LA><ART, Los Angeles (2008); and …Day was to Fall as Night was to Break…, Daniel Reich Gallery New York (2006). His work has been included in group exhibitions such as: De belles sculptures contemporaines, FRAC Pays de la Loire (2013); Les vagues, FRAC Pays de la loire (2010); La Ronde, Centre d’art de la Ferme du Buisson (2011); Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, LACMA Los Angeles (2008); From and about Place, CCA Tel Aviv (2008); the 2007 Montreal Biennial; and the 2006 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach.
About the Careyes Foundation Art and Community Program
The Careyes Foundation Contemporary Art and Community Program is committed to supporting cultural exchange and dialog in the context of Careyes Mexico by bringing international artists to produce work in a unique and generative environment with a focus on arts education in the surrounding community. Artists-in-residence to date have included artists from Mexico City, Guadalajara and around the globe including Artemio, Maximo Gonzalez, Francisco Ugarte, Mary Weatheford, Conrad Shawcross and Scoli Acosta. A forthcoming residency will occur with Adria Julia in 2016 with a focus in the history of villages surrounding Careyes and the local landscape. The program is curated by Lauri Firstenberg.
