Sydney Acosta (b. 1987, Yanawana aka San Antonio, TX) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from UCLA in 2021. Recent exhibitions include It Never Entered My Mind at Galeria Mascota; Lavinia at Hannah Hoffman, The Gift of Strawberries at South Willard, Filled with Song at Kristina Kite; When the Stones Clash, Michael Benevento; of the world (with Luz Carabaño), Castle gallery. She has been supported by Maracuya artist residency, the MacDowell Fellowship, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the LA Lakers emerging artist grant and the American Austrian Foundation.
Influenced by the history of landscape and vanitas painting, I am interested in making art that brings the viewer into a deeper connection with the preciousness of time. My interpretation of vanitas takes contemporary imagery as its subject: fast cars, dance music and common symbols of death and rebirth – the money tree, a forest, calacas, a heart, a rose, a butterfly, a rainbow. I’m not interested in the original image but rather the copied and reusable, the remembered and mis-remembered. The readymade and common image has a power that has been invested in over time and generations.
The painting Filled with Song is also the title of the complete set of drawings I made at MacDowell. I made the series of 97 drawings as a nightly ritual during my 2022 residency, pulling singular moments from the day as a source or a beginning to an image. From texts I read: James Baldwin, Jennifer Tseng, Yan Ge, Kathy Acker, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (the drawings Rose and “I scarcely know how to describe that room…”) From a long walk through the woods alone at night and a horror movie (the drawing Lightless Landscapes) From a flashback of desire and the feeling of longing (the drawing Dedication Hour) From the sky, a cloud churning, a horizon heavy with red, the underground. Using the space of a landscape as a metaphor for death, memorializing a friend’s passing (Reincarnation).
I look to the landscape because it holds so much. The history and future. I return to drawing as a primary language, a communication that is pre-lingual, beyond language – broken and complicated. It reflects my lived experience. Yet the drawings are neither autobiographical nor strictly representational. They exist as meditations on transience. Beyond this, I draw from direct observation, from my experiences being in nature, and from my dreams and memory.
The drawings generate the large format paintings. I draw and paint very fast. I find the speed simplifies composition and narrative. I use dry brushing and very little medium or solvents in the application of the paint. This process approximates the feeling of drawing on paper with charcoal and pastel in its directness and immediacy, leaving little space for subtraction.
Portrait by Sam Richardson
