ARTISTS

Marco Scozarro

Baxter St. Residency (2016)

Marco Scozzaro employs a photographic fiction-making process as obliquely autobiographical, fabricating, inventing, and constructing images that straddle both criticism and confession. Subverting a tantalizing advertising style of rich colors and textures with staged images that disorient, Scozzaro questions the representability of certain ideas that recur in mass media. Not merely a criticism of oversimplification in visual culture today, his images are also documents of a purposely mis-directed self-representation.

Scozzaro’s work aims to explore different layers and notions of identity. In particular, Digital Deli is a quest in the American vernacular and the uncertain dimension where I find myself now.

As digital technology continues to shape behaviors and the general taste, I am trying to decipher the complexity of the contemporary landscape and to find similarities between seemingly opposite elements: analogue-digital, natural-artificial, real-virtual. I am interested in the generic, the banal, the mundane, and I focus my attention on details that can unveil a whole new world. To observe this complexity I use a variety of digital and more tradition tools: an iPhone, a 4×5” film camera, a scanner, and glitches emanating from a corrupted hard drive. I reference and sample vernacular photography and advertising, using generic imagery and cultural leftovers to analyze the saturation of the semiotic sphere we live in.

Internet and the overwhelming amount of images that appear at the same level on the browser influence my current practice. The title of my book Sviaggioni is a made up Italian word that could translate into “big mind trips”. The juxtaposition of objects, pattern and textures taken from different contexts and collated into mood boards creates a sort of psychedelic experience. I use the term Digital Deli to complement this idea as a metaphor of a complex system where several layers of meaning and different elements are casually mixed or blended together. I am intrigued by the possibility of unifying opposites by juxtaposing images that are, on first viewing, different but related on a much broader level.