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Scoli Acosta's architectural interventions are like
cell phone towers disguised as trees; they pretend to blend in with
their surroundings and end up failing miserably. Then again, Acosta
isn't trying very hard. He paints a column to look like brick and
then cuts out a section to reveal its wooden supports. He surrounds
an electrical outlet with multiple painted facsimiles that could
never be mistaken for real, and crudely overlays a decorative floral
relief with a grid resembling a solar panel.
However, his two, room-size installations are concerned
with much more than bad trompe l'oeil effects. The centerpiece of
the larger one, Rising Night, Lily White (2007-08), is
an upside-down igloo made of shoeboxes painted various hues and
held together with brightly colored duct tape. Lined with aluminum
foil, the interior reflects light from a garish wire-and-cardboard
chandelier shaped like a bouquet of lilies. Underfoot, networks
of color photocopies depicting water lilies lead to custom-decorated
paper shopping bags. One bears an image of R. Buckminster Fuller,
proponent of the geodesic dome; another an oft-reproduced work of
neoclassical kitsch, Daybreak, by early 20th century painter
Maxfield Parrish.
It's all a bit much (I haven't even mentioned the
assemblage of a radiator and hanging lamp adorned with paper Mexican
wrestler's masks, the black arched doorways and stylized, multi-colored
stars painted on the walls, or the drawing of Parrish's toga-draped
figures set against a geodesic dome). At times, Acosta's wobbly
paper and cardboard constructions feel like they might collapse
under the weight of their myriad, layered references. Still, amid
the cacophony, the work offers a nuanced, often darkly humorous
critique of technological and environmental progress.
The igloo-chandelier combo, for example, is an ingenious
construction. An inverted geodesic dome, it can also be read as
an oblique comment on the impact of global warming: a literal turning
upside-down (or inside out) of a human shelter designed for life
in harmony with a harsh environment. Not only does it upend the
idealism of a visionary like Fuller, but it also suggests that our
relationship to nature has been irrevocably distorted.
The chandelier stands in for a natural phenomenon
(the sun) and mimics a natural form (flowers), but is entirely fake.
As in a Parrish painting, decorative simulation has supplanted messy
nature. By building such fantastical structures out of the cast-off,
disposable byproducts of consumer society, Acosta mocks our utopian
visions of technological development even as he admits their imitable
appeal.
This idea emerges more clearly in the smaller installation.
Bountiful (2008) also plays with the relationships between
surface and substance—transforming bricks into fake artifacts
from the past and cardboard into mockeries of technologies of the
future—but its tighter integration of brick and solar panel
motifs puts a finer point on the argument.
One wall features a tiny pot that Acosta made by shaving
down a brick, reverse-engineering an industrial product into one
that looks prehistoric. On the floor, a chunk of brick wall has
been worn smooth like a river stone, and at the back of the gallery,
a system of cardboard "pipes" covered in color photocopies
of solar panels produces a painted blue fountain of "water."
This playful replica of plumbing, complete with a
nod to alternative energy, has some of the dreamy, DIY quality of
a Michel Gondry film. But while Gondry's characters employ humble
means to fabricate alternate realities that are often better than
real life, Acosta's creations are imploded fantasies. By recycling
consumer castoffs into makeshift versions of classic forms, they
reveal how waste is camouflaged as progress. Gondry's improvisations
are escape routes into the imagination; Acosta reminds us that although
we may chuckle along the way, there is no escape.
This review originally appeared
in the May/June 2008 issue of Art
Papers. Reprinted with permission.
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