Scoli Acosta, The Jungle Meets the Sea
Careyes Foundation, Mexique
2015

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.