source: mariozootsblogspot

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.