LACMA

110 SCOLI ACOSTA In his performance pieces, Scoli Acosta has transformed his head and torso into a volcano, his arms into flying doves, and his forehead into antlers. In his installations, he has refashioned patio screening into a moonshine distillery and popcorn into a poodle. Acosta immerses the viewer in a narrative space, urging a suspension of disbelief when encountering the everyday object transformed. His work operates out of what he calls an "aesthetics of resourcefulness." Acosta enjoys the object that betrays its own handmade quality, and often works with humble materials such as papier-mâché, discarded plastics, cardboard, and repurposed found or thrifted objects. Acosta responds to his physical surroundings and transforms—almost alchemically— their quotidian facets into a shimmering fantastical realm that is an exaggeration of his real-world encounters. Objects torn from daily life, such as shoelaces and bottle caps, populate topographies (diagrammatically arranged in his elaborate installations) and provide an almost novelized approach to the studio or gallery space. Indeed, Acosta's relocation to Paris became a protracted transformation of his daily life into art projects inspired by the French writer Gérard de Nerval. From 1999 to 2004, Acosta created performances and photographically documented sites pertinent to Nerval's life. Sustained by residencies at various museums and alternative art spaces, Acosta eventually staged an elaborate production of Piquillo ou le Rêve de Mr. Hulule, an operetta attributed to Nerval. Evoking the integrative performance practice of artist David Wojnarowicz in his own contemporary elegies to Arthur Rimbaud, Acosta found himself living a theatrical "day-to-day novel" during his time in Paris. Since his return to Los Angeles in 2004, Acosta has immersed himself in drawing, painting, and installations that involve the residue of different road trips and urban explorations. The narrative artworks that had been inspired by the aura of Parisian street life have given way to American landscape mythologies of transportation and transformation. Acosta's landscapes represent not just the exterior and ecological material spaces but the emotive and interior spaces of our psyches. In Big Well, his project at the 2005 liste (a space for commissioned projects at the Art Basel fair), Acosta made homage to Big Well, one of the largest hand-dug wells in the world, located in Greensburg, Kansas (damaged by a tornado in May 2007). As critic Anne Martens has noted, the well (and others like it) is a site where people divest themselves of objects both dear and dispensable. The bottom of the well as a fusion of both things beloved and discarded seems an appropriate analogy to the material mix in Acosta's own installations. Installation spaces like Big Well and his more recent project for the 2006 California Biennial resemble the gridlike, theatrical sets for his performances. Filters and screens function in Acosta's work aesthetically, materially, and conceptually. He uses the metaphor of filtering to describe how he lets references or signifiers from his own environment into the "mind frames" of a particular drawing or sculpture. Found objects that are remade using different materials also are arranged and rearranged as sculptures and drawings. Recently, a floral relief—a mass-produced decora- tive element meant to spruce up a family room wall—that he found in a thrift store has become a motif. In addition to sketching the floral motif, he has recast it as a mask or exten- sion growing out of his head, making it into a performance prop. Acosta takes banal design elements and mutates them, and in doing so enables his works to signify anything from the destructive force of an atomic cloud to the ritualistic capacity of a shaman's mask.— RITA GONZALEZ

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