Tom Costa

My Pet Ram is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Peekskill-based artist Tom Costa. Titled Slow Drip, the exhibition presents seven black and white ink on paper drawings, exploring the inevitability of time, natural decay, and the metaphysical relationship between humans and the earth.

From the wellspring of his own memories and experiences, Costa draws on his upbringing in rural Virginia. Forever surrounded by nature and the rustbelt towns that occupy them, Costa’s work juxtaposes the chaotic, unrelenting landscapes of the Blue Ridge Mountains with intrusive man-made structures, such as ripped fences and abandoned buildings. This tension between the two is accentuated by his psychedelic, painterly style, and illusionary approach.

Through multiple applications and processes, Costa’s work revels in the binary. Only utilizing black and white, the artist explains the lack of midtones accounts for an unsettling flip between foreground and background, allowing for optical uncertainty and challenge for the viewer. Reminiscent of halftones and distortion found in analog screenprinting methods, Costa’s dense compositions don’t leave any room for definition, tricking the eye and blurring the lines between figure and landscape. Fervent, concentric lines faintly define his human subjects, yet their interiors consist of the surrounding nature. Abstracting and obscuring our own sense of reality, Costa’s work oscillates on a thin line of perception, one meant to confound what we think versus what we know.

According to the artist, Costa’s bodies hover between the real and the conceptual, acting as vessels for our own experiences, internalizing universal feelings and existentialism. On the other end, they are merely thin barriers for nature, a penetrable boundary in which the environment they inhabit easily passes through. Their outlines are the only traces of existence, symbolizing the temporality of life and the fleeting nature of all things living.