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Exhibition Detail Scoli Acosta Bountiful LAXART 2640 S. La Cienega Los Angeles, CA 90034 January 19th, 2008 - March 1st, 2008 Opening: January 19th, 2008 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
	Scoli Acosta, Cornerstone , 2008, Photo lightjet print Edition of 10 & 3 APs, 11 x 14 inches © Courtesy of the artist and LAXART

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LAXART is pleased to present two site specific gallery installations and a public billboard project by Los Angeles based artist Scoli Acosta, marking his Los Angeles solo debut. Comprised of a new body of sculpture, video and painting, Acosta's projects at LAXART present distinct sprawling installations that physically overtake both exhibition spaces. Reflecting a highly personalized iconography, Acosta's projects employ a near obsessional approach to the transformation of common objects and found materials. Recycling such discarded items as elegant brick fragments, polished driftwood and abandoned domestic furniture, Acosta's approach is one that relies upon the appropriation of found forms already toiled over by natural processes.

In Bountiful, the motif of red brick with mortar appears throughout much of the installation in LAXART's gallery two. The artist has dutifully crafted an array of sculptures made from segments of red brick walls washed ashore on local beaches. Using the forms and palette of these collected pedestrian architectural fragments, Acosta creates a world in which red brick operates as a material reformed by organic processes only then to be taken up by the artist for a series of ongoing playful formal and material investigations, ranging from quasi-narrative drawings and paintings to highly abstracted sculptures. The motifs that occupy the artist in the context of Bountiful allude to Greek classicism and mythology, as evidenced in Acosta's reoccurring iconography that include lyrical and genial cornucopia, perverse portrait busts and corrupted Corinthian columns. Heavy facture and rough soil enter his semi-figurative paintings, comprised of utopian landscapes and ornamental still lifes. His visual language is paradoxical--illustrative yet impenetrable, accessible yet opaque.

In the installations consuming both exhibition spaces, Acosta has recycled a range of discarded materials in an attempt to imbue their formal qualities to pose questions around the intersections of object making, decoration, performance, humor and poetry. Surrounded by an array of visual signifiers, a sculptural lily chandelier and upside-down igloo made from shoeboxes and tinfoil occupy the gallery's mainspace. Departing from Acosta's early performance works, such set pieces link together sculptural and architectural detail to suggest the potential for implied narrative structures.

A public billboard, facing north on La Cienega Boulevard between Venice and Washington Boulevards, accompanies this project.

Scoli Acosta has previously studied fine art in such institutions as the Kansas City Art Institute (1994) and the Ultimate Akademie in Colonge, Germany (1997). Recent solo exhibitions include the ...Day was to Fall as Night was to Break..., Daniel Reich Gallery, New York (2006) and Follow me a Fantasy, Arena 1 Gallery, Los Angeles (2005). His work has been included in the context of such exhibitions as the 2007 Montreal Biennial, Montreal, Canada, the 2006 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, LISTE 2005, Basel, Switzerland, and will be included in the upcoming exhibition entitled Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art later this year.