Howard’s is proud to present an exhibition by Athens based artist Mo Costello. The show will open June 8th from 4-6 pm, and will run through July 13th.
The breadth of Mo Costello’s work encompasses photo, video, and installation. This show includes a selection of Gelatin Silver Prints, approximately 2 x 3 inches, from a single roll of film. Depicted is an intimate exchange between Mo and her then partner, Kong Im, in an apartment in Providence, RI. The time between frames is notably brief. These are exposures made quickly, as the camera moves back and forth between their hands. Consistently, the camera, as aperture, is engaged as an extension of the body. An opening motivated less by coherent feedback, or formal concision, and more so in response to ordinary longing, to compulsion. Prompted by sound, by touch, by shifting light.
Untitled (Kong), Gelatin Silver Print, 2.7x1.8", 2019
The images function as a fractured and disconnected narrative stream. As if a collection of singular film-stills, traces of an experience are pieced together as an aesthetic reminiscence. Details offer hints of a bigger story and the poignant and unreachable space between pictures.
Mo’s work explores the entanglement of ecstasy and the mundane. In her photographs, this fissure is thin. Objective and subjective experience is intertwined and often indecipherable. Jose Esteban Muñoz describes a similar dialogue between scenes of domestic banality and unspectacular bliss in the poetry of James Schuyler and Elizabeth Bishop - writers whose books, poems and letters are scattered across Mo's bedroom studio. Simultaneously, Mo explains, these writers, reveal the ways by which, a simple gesture signals a bond that somehow interrupts the ubiquity of terror.
She continues:
Accumulatively, it may be that my images speak to addiction and to loss. Encountered however in fragments, and as brief passages of time, there is evidence of tenderness and adoration. Of dependence and obligation. Of pleasure and abandon. And of quiet ecstasy.”
Untitled (Hand), Gelatin Silver Print, 2.7x1.8", 2019
Mo Costello was born in Seattle and is now based in Athens, Georgia. She received a BA from Southern Oregon University and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2014). She is the recipient of recent fellowships from the University of Georgia's Lamar Dodd School of Art (2015 - 2017) and Emory University (2017), as well as a studio residencies from ATHICA (2020) and The Lyndon House Art Center (2018). Recent exhibitions include Scattered and Smothered at The Atlanta Contemporary; Can You Dream It? (Yes We Can!) at Kristin Lorello Gallery, NYC; and Paul Pfeiffer: Incarnator at Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin, for which she collaborated with Pfeiffer on a film by the same name. Josmel (2019), was additionally included in Carlier/Gebauer's Rotating Viewing Room. Former projects include: The Zero School of Art + Time in Atlanta’s South Downtown, established alongside Blair LeBlanc in Spring 2018; Reading Station (HH), a site specific installation and term-long curatorial project conceived and organized while in residency at the University of Georgia as well as NEWSPAPER (1969 - 2017), an exhibition co-curated with publisher Marcelo Gabriel Yañez.