Exhibitions —

april april presents a suite of five drawings by Mo Costello in the gallery’s Dining Room.

Charcoal and soot rubbings on found paper expound marks as embodied citations, through which place-based inquiry occurs. Marks are gathered and formed through a non-linear process of improvised registrations and reproductions around the artist’s home of Athens, Georgia, and strike a formal analogy to the silver gelatin work Costello more often produces. Within these, a metaphor for contact drudges up the immense desire for connection inherent to photography. Trace functions as both a record and its longing.

While all works revel in a space somewhere beyond legibility—wherein grayscales of scratches, smudges and swathes graph a gestural score atop various substrates—some slip into index. Two drawings are borne of a takeaway box from Krystal, a fast food restaurant near the artist’s house, that Costello employs as a positive for rubbings. Here the word Krystal repeats like a ringing bell. Another—a tri-fold from Dia Beacon—washes in a howl of soot sourced from train tracks, cat bites carving out names written for the program like Louise Bourgeois and John Chamberlain. The contextual collision speaks to their incompatibility, the work of making-do against that of making-monument.

Mo Costello (b. 1989, Seattle, WA) lives and works in Athens, GA. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Howard's, Athens, GA, and april april (with Nabil Azab) in Brooklyn, NY. Recent residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Denniston Hill. In 2024, Costello received a Teiger Foundation grant for her 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, co-curated by Katz Tepper.