Tom Costa “short distances”

Tom Costa “short distances”

Sardine

This event has ended.

SARDINE presents a solo show of new work by Tom Costa called short distances.

In short distances, Tom Costa presents a mix of small oil paintings and large ink on paper works. The pieces in the show are composed of remembered and imagined imagery, location, and event. Obsessively rendered without the aid of projectors or photo reference, the works are an uncanny blend of realism and impossibility. This duality is echoed in the subject matter of the works, which seem to be both loaded with playful allegory, while also nihilistically vacant. It is about loss and entropy, tedium and vice, loneliness, a moment of self reflection.

A constant in Costa’s work, landscape is the most direct way to talk about our place in the world and our relationship to it. As a child he was captivated by the epic works of Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Cole, which he spent hours attempting to recreate in colored pencil. More formative however, where the years he spent exploring the wilderness of central Virginia, and the sleepy back alleys of his hometown. Through his work, Costa speaks of the landscape as the embodiment of beauty and horror, the simultaneous location of life and death, of growth and entropy. The landscape is a location of endless potential, a constant junction between the cerebral world of humans and the physical world, and a universal symbol of our changing relationship with the natural world we emerged from.

Tom Costa has had solo shows at Hood Gallery, Audio Visual Arts, and Clementine Gallery. His work has been included in shows at Leo Koenig Gallery and Lesley Heller work space, as well as galleries and spaces throughout New York, nationally, and abroad. Costa received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Tom Costa lives and works in Peekskill, New York.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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