PAST EXHIBITION

Digital Deli

Marco Scozzaro

Baxter St at CCNY is pleased to announce 2016 Workspace Resident Marco Scozzaro’s solo show Digital Deli. 

In his exhibition, 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. In some of Scozzaro’s work there is a clear tension between the naturally mechanical aspect of photography where the camera plagiarizes nature versus the corruption of that verisimilitude with a variety of techniques. The corruptions and contradictions appear as variations of the very notions they reference in a kind of object-oriented ontology that ultimately revokes a hierarchy of signification.

– text by Jorge Alberto Perez

Press

Scozzaro’s Digital Deli emboldens an environment of jovial incandescence. Seemingly straightforward formats open a circus of intent and layering. By his own admission Scozzaro professes that the images are, “Something you can recognize but become something else because of form.” Ambient elements innovate materials and realities inside the worlds he feeds. Desires and creations, communicators articulated in robust constructions. Atmospheric jungles in space and leeway, colors playful as they are distinct and particular. Identities of photography utilize ways in which values are personal reflections. Epiphany, epoch, echo enticing elements that allow for contemplative insecurities. The photography here is vast in distinction. L’oeil De La Photographie.

Marco Scozzaro’s technicolor still lives parody the logic of advertisements with a wry sense of humor. In the image “Beta 909,” for example, obsolete analog production equipment is posed on a backdrop of fruit-printed contact paper. Scozzaro claims this series is also semi-autobiographical. If that means he spent his formative years making synthpop and beta max music videos in a bodega bathroom. Artfcity

Formerly trained as a fashion photographer, the artist works with film photography and then digitally manipulates it to create surreal and strange visual landscape. In an interview with Qiana Mestrich the artist noted that his “work is an exploration of the current visual vernacular and I wanted to take different elements from the visual landscape and digest and work with them to create multilayered photographs and sculptures.” Scozzaro just celebrated his first solo exhibition, “Digital Deli,”  at Baxter St, in New York earlier this year. Artnet News.