Exhibitions —

april april and Petra Bibeau are pleased to collaborate on a two-person presentation for EXPO Chicago 2025, featuring works by Mo Costello and Dionne Lee in the fair’s EXPOSURE Sector, curated by Rosario Güiraldes.

This marks thefirst dialogue between the two artists, whose photographic practices converge around a shared interest in land, history, and survival, articulated through deeply tactile and materially grounded approaches.

Through silver gelatin prints and collages, both artists challenge the conventions of documentary photography, using analog processes to propose photography as a medium of inquiry—one rooted in lived experience, embodiment, and speculation.

Mo Costello offers a poetic, formally modest counterpoint to traditions of itinerant photography. Her black-and-white images, made on 35mm film and printed document front porches, back porches, and thresholds—spaces of informal infrastructure and improvised collectivity. Her practice is attuned to the quiet traces of daily life: places of access, contact, and collision, where care and reliance emerge as provisional strategies of survival. In Costello’s work, opacity and withholding become modes of resistance; the photograph is not a window flung open, but a quietly held breath—an incantation suspended in time.

Dionne Lee’s silver gelatin collages and mixed media works span from 2019 to 2023, charting an evolving engagement with the American landscape as a site of trauma and resilience. Through analog photography and archival research, Lee weaves together fragments of wilderness manuals, how-to guides, and geologic records to question inherited narratives of ownership, belonging, and control. Hands recur as a motif—grasping, pointing, navigating—echoing ancestral knowledge and embodied memory. Her recent works from the Fault Condition series (2023) deepen this investigation, presenting the land not as static ground, but as an active witness to historical rupture and ongoing change.

Together, Costello and Lee offer resonant approaches to photography as both record and ritual—inviting viewers into a nuanced meditation on visibility, place-making, and the poetics of survival.

Mo Costello (b. 1989, Seattle, WA) lives and works in Athens, GA. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Atlanta Center for Photography, Atlanta, GA (2025); Howard's, Athens, GA (2019); and april april (with Nabil Azab) in Brooklyn, NY (2021). Recent residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Denniston Hill. This fall, Costello will be in residence at Wysing Arts Center, Cambridge, UK, and has a forthcoming solo presentation at april april, Pittsburgh, PA. In 2024, alongside co-curator Katz Tepper, Costello received a Teiger Foundation grant for their curatorial research on Beverly Buchanan, which will culminate in an exhibition titled Beverly's Athens at the Athenaeum at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA, opening January 2026.

Dionne Lee (b. 1988, New York, NY) lives and works in Columbus, OH and received an MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2017. Lee’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Princeton University Art Museum, Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver, CA, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA, Aperture Foundation, New York, International Center of Photography, New York, Light Work, New York, and Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts.

Recent exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, The Whitney Museum of American Art; New York, Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, Prologue, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, All This Soft Wild Buzzing, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA, Spora, Swiss Institute, New York, Like Water, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK, Penumbra Foundation, New York City, Bibeau Krueger, New York City, Tara Downs, New York City, Cushion Works, San Francisco, CA, The Locker Plant / Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX, Et al. San Francisco, CA, /(Slash), San Francisco, CA, FotoFest Biennial 2022: If I Had a Hammer, Houston, TX, and Center For Fine Art Photography at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Fort Collins, CO. Upcoming group exhibitions in 2025 include: Once Within A Time: 12th International, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM, and Outlooks: Dionne Lee, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY.

Lee was an Artist-in-Residence at the Chinati Foundation, Unseen California, and Land Arts of the American West between 2022-2023. In 2019 Lee was an artist in residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. In 2016 Lee was awarded the Barclay Simpson Award and a Graduate Fellowship at Anderson Ranch Arts Center.