Details:
① Artwork:
Red Night 2 (for Cristian)
In this artwork, two hands are pressed together, perhaps the hands of a diver, the pressed hands of a worshiper, or the hands of two lovers reaching toward each other. Acosta’s imagery is sourced from religious paintings and texts across cultures, with a focus on the hybridized religious art born of diaspora and migration.
Sydney Acosta takes contemporary imagery as her subject: fast cars, dance music, and family photographs, as well as common symbols of death and rebirth, such as the money tree, a forest, a heart, a rose, a butterfly, or a rainbow. Her imagery is sourced from books and religious art across different cultures, harnessing the power of the readymade image. Acosta draws from direct observation, her experience of nature, and her dreams or memories, yet her drawings are neither autobiographical nor representational.
Specs:
② Offered by:
③ Artist:
Sydney Acosta explores the preciousness of time through direct observations of nature that she obfuscates with memories and dreams. Acosta is influenced by landscape and vanitas painting, using a concise visual language ranging from the personal — fast cars, dance music, family photographs, the forest, butterflies, money trees, hearts, roses — to the historical — hybridized religious art, feminist queer literate, and poetry. The result is work that meditates on death and rebirth, diaspora and migration, hybridity, dislocation, and love. She is concerned with the copied, the reusable, the remembered and imagined — work that is neither autobiographical nor representational, existing in a space somewhere between the stillness of photography and a fleeting thought.
Sydney Acosta lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include It Never Entered my Mind at Galeria Mascota, Mexico City, There is Feeling at Night gallery, Lavinia at Hannah Hoffman, The Gift of Strawberries at South Willard, Filled with Song at Kristina Kite, When Stones Clash, Michael Benevento, The Death of Beauty, Sargent’s Daughters, of the world (with Luz Carabaño), at CASTLE, Los Angeles, CA. She has been supported by the MacDowell Fellowship, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the LA Lakers emerging artist grant and the American Austrian Foundation. She received her MFA from UCLA in 2021.
