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source: mariozoots

Denver-based Mario Zoots’ collages exist in a dreamlike reality: faces and shapes are reformed, their individual parts becoming cleverly hidden or exposed until they coagulate into something entirely transformative. The viewing experience can be disorienting, which in itself implicates Zoots’ belief that there is a presupposed psychology and ideology inherent in images. It is his intention, it seems, to distort that language, ultimately reappropriating it and raising questions about how — and why — it exists. Ideas regarding the Internet and the fetishism of its exigencies — and the ways in which both have reformatted typical modes of thinking — have seeped into Zoots’ recent work via digital images and manipulation. The result: the aforementioned dreamy quality of his work becomes curiously juxtaposed to its roots, which is more hyper-cerebral than whimsical. Polymathic to the core — he is one-half of art and music collective Modern Witch — Zoots’ foray beyond small print zines and into galleries has produced works more inherently introspective than before, as the placement of his pieces in visceral print form ultimately complicates them. The accompanying description to his upcoming exhibition at Mexico City’s Preteen Gallery, ‘I JUST WANNA BE AS PRETTY AS I FEEL,’ is a collaboration with Preteen’s curator, Gerardo Contreras, and discusses the exploration of notions about hallucination and the existence of the self, appropriately manifested in Zoots’ new, psychedelic collages. We discussed over e-mail the details of both the show and his earlier work.
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source: wanderingbears

The photographic collage work of Mario Zoots is both disturbing and enthralling, like a sick joke you’re not supposed to laugh at or like a fun nightmare. The work feels as familiar as much as it does chaotic almost confusing but with plenty of color and humor. Zoots has that nostalgic aesthetic everybody’s into right now but is still conceptually sound. Repetition, displacement, and the role of reimagination are recurring themes.

By digitally manipulating images, Zoot’s collages make a direct comment about the nature of contemporary cyber-culture. But what exactly that comment or cyber-culture is I couldn’t tell you. I’d say the idea is left to the audience but it feels truer to say that this type of obscurity is native to the nature of subject matter Zoots is speaking on: self-reflexive, confusing, and overall hypersaturated.
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source: tendencias

Si tuvieramos que explicar de alguna forma artística como nos sentimos tras los atracones navideños, sería sin duda alguna: el collage. Uno que sabe mucho de esto es Mario Zoots, quien el 2008 empezó publicando en algunos libros de arte contemporáneo, pasando por revistas como Nylon, tiendas como Urban outfitters hasta ser nombrado como uno de los artistas Top por la revista 5280 de Denver, su residencia actual y donde sigue estudiando. Empezó juntando unos trozos de papel para seguir por lo digital… vídeos y fotografías son unas de sus máximas en sus exposiciones y si no le quieres perder la pista tiene todo un universo Zoots colgado en el mundo.