Kelsey Costello: Uncontained
Curated by Terri Saulin Frock
April 3 – April 26, 2015
Curated by Terri Saulin Frock
April 3 – April 26, 2015
Uncontained Q & A
T: Terri Saulin Frock
K: Kelsey Costello
T: When you were a student, I noted that for about two years, you carried around a copy of Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems. When I look at the new work, I feel a sort of visual poetry that relates to Howl in the way the narrative has no restrictions and has a tumbling, rhythmic breath like feel. Is there any connection to poetry in the way you collect and construct imagery?
K: Ginsburg writes in a stream of consciousness/prose style. He communicates overwhelming feelings and sentimentality about sometimes profound, but often, simple moments. The dull and ordinary become elevated to an important status. Like Ginsberg, I get nostalgic and emotional over generally plain moments. For example, there is a can in my show depicting a FedEx warehouse, it is a really simple piece. It is just a memory, a moment in time. I delivered a loaded trailer to the San Bernadino sorting facility off of Cajon pass. My partner and I got there at dawn. He had been driving the last leg, while I was sleeping. He woke me up to see if I needed to use the bathroom. I got out of the truck to walk to the building, and saw that the color of the sky was periwinkle and lavender. Little bits of the clouds were lit up. There is a particular quality to the air in the mornings in California in the summer. It's cool and wet, refreshing and floral. The sky was in prime condition that morning. Really, it was a most un-special moment, but recalling it still gets me wildly excited.
T: There is quite a mash-up of Art History and Pop-Culture in the work. My mind doesn’t immediately connect William Morris to Kim and Kanye. You mentioned how you can travel from pace to place in your car/truck, but with google earth, you can go anywhere. Can you talk about your process as you construct your surface.
K: Haha, yes. You can go anywhere on the Internet.
I got my first camera right before I hiked the Appalachian Trail and have been taking an excessive amount of photos since.
While I was still a student at Moore and the first few months after graduation, I loved to visit the arts library on the University of Pennsylvania campus. I would go through stacks of books looking at architecture, tile patterns and wallpaper. I frantically photocopied everything I liked, because I wasn’t able to take the books out. I still have drawers of images and continue to reference them.
I like patterns. I get involved in them. Patterns are wild. I enjoy the aesthetic of designs and colors and overall manic looking surfaces. Life is manic, my mindset is manic, and I put that sentiment into my work.
Most of my jobs and non-art hobbies allow time for my mind wander. I've worked a number of manual labor jobs, and I run, hike and ride my bike in my spare time. My mind just runs. I think about the profound things, obsess over societal issues and personal problems, and then I try to daydream all sorts of solutions and fantasies to keep the boredom at bay.
I'll use the Starbucks bottle as an example. I had my very first coffee at Starbucks in middle school at the mall. It was the dawn of the Starbucks spread and was bringing coffee shop culture to the suburbs. It was kind of like McDonalds, every store was pretty much the same, and the product was consistently the same. But unlike other chains, Starbucks seemed so much more upper-crust. From the fancy Italian words, to the decor of the restaurants, Starbucks was selling a bit of bourgeois in a to go cup. I do not think I realized that I could have a cup of coffee at Starbucks in a ceramic mug for years. I always got that white cup, with the white lid and the crisp green circle logo. There was a sort of cleanliness about it.
You know that Warhol quote about Coca-Cola?
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
I feel like Starbucks is just as much of an iconic, basic item as Coca-Cola. You can get a hundred drinks made for you there, and the more variations you request, the more your drink costs. Starbucks as a daily drink is actually out of the reach of most people. It is a luxurious necessity that most people shouldn't be spending money on. It's the new false need. Five dollars a day for coffee is excessive for the average person. The to go cup is part of my infatuation with Starbucks, and is part of the larger idea of this body of work.
I currently live in Seattle. I knew I needed to make a Starbucks piece, so I dreamed this piece up in my living room. Instead of using the storefront from the Pikes Place Market, only a couple miles from my house, or just taking images from one of the standard storefronts, I thought of the one on 4th and South in Philly. Starbucks is generally a cookie cutter type of business and has a brand identity, but this location’s
original facade was left unchanged. The 4th & South Starbucks is just like any other city coffee shop inhabiting a corner spot on a block of row homes. I always liked that. I also love that I am three thousand miles away, and I can make sketches of the building from Google maps street view. I used that same process for the sunshine cafe. I only had close up pictures of the men at the tables and didn't know what color the roof was and I wanted to be real to life, so I just looked it up. I love the Internet as a resource. I like the idea that I have the ability to Google-fill in the blanks of what I may have missed trying to record things.
T: Your building process is fascinating and also kind of hilarious. You mentioned that these were all coil
built stoneware, why are you so attached to the coil building method?
K: I used clay for the first time in first grade. I made a terra cotta coil pot and loved every part of the experience. Gotta stick with what you know? The only reason I don't use terra cotta is because my apartment has white carpet. I kind of want my security deposit back.
[oh, bad jokes...]
After years of making coil pots, I've become good at making them. I feel like I'm actually able to create in a way where I'm unobstructed by the method. I like the pace of coil pots. Building, shaping, waiting for things to stiffen up to continue building, is slow, but sure.
T: When I first saw the work via emailed images, I had no idea how large they were. All of the vessels are super-sized. What can you tell me about the novelty scale of the objects? Is there a formula that you use to decide how much to increase the size?
K: I really didn't have much consideration in the size. I measured the kiln at the store where I had them fired, and I often felt limited by that. The cartons and taller bottles barely fit inside. For the most part the sizes are arrived at intuitively, cans are small and milk cartons are big. I really hope to eventually have access to larger kilns. I would like working a bit larger. I don't like fragile things. I also find bigger stuff to be more tangible, more tactile.
T: These "throw away" contemporary forms have been elevated to precious relic status. The surface treatment is exquisite, yet some of the surfaces are fragile and somewhat impermanent. For instance, some of the collaged paper projects forward in a tromp l’oeil effect. Can you talk a bit about the dichotomy between the polished painted surface and the fragility of the paper cut outs?
K: You asked about the duality of pop culture and art history... and I'd say that this is a parallel question. Typically, I drew out the location, the building, room, whatever, in incised lines onto the wet clay. Painting it adds a layer of kitsch. The places are not real anymore to me. They exist in my mind, with memories about the weather, the look of the sunlight, how I felt about myself at the time. I was satisfied with the cartoony look for the location, but whenever I would try to include people in the same way, it just didn't feel or look right. I don't actually know the people depicted on the pieces. Most probably still exist in the world, having no knowledge of the strange girl who watched and took photos of them as they went about their lives. It feels a bit perverse, but if I drew my strangers, it would feel like I was taking away the reality of the moment, a thinner experience. The photographic images of the people contrast to my chaotic/manic memories, they are still. They have memories of those moments too, but they experienced the shared time in a way I will never know about. The variations on the surface mimic how I think and how I consider past experiences. Nothing is ever too clear. Time passes and continually changes how we feel about our experiences. Sometimes memories get sweeter, sometimes things get forgotten. Life is weird and messy and terrible and manic.
T: We both have full time jobs and studio demands and were mainly arranging this exhibition whirlwind style via Facebook. You have a really interesting job and your studio is in your home. Tell me more about your current job and home studio. How does a typical day go in Kelsey’s world?
K: Life since school has been strange. Most of the things I have done have been out of financial frustration. Cheap traveling happened because working didn’t seem worth it. Taking time sucking jobs, like trucking, was to pay off student loans. I had planned on getting right into the "art scene" and getting an "art career" started immediately after graduation, but chasing the fulfillment of basic needs had to happen first. I felt like I could not have my dignity if I were asking my dad to buy me groceries. When I finally got a day job and apartment in West Philly in the summer of 2012, making things felt odd, not natural. I eventually got back into working on clay stuff, but instead of feeling like I needed to make art for some actual purpose, I just made things I had been dreaming about for the past three years. It felt like a glorious privilege.
T: You had a great number of visitors that had many questions for you about the work at the opening. I understand this is your first show since your undergraduate experience at Moore, what was it like to finally be able to show and talk about the work you have been making over the last two years? What is your impression about the "Collective Gallery Experience" in Philadelphia?
K: This series of work dragged on and expanded over the course of two years. I showed pictures to my friends and posted them on my Facebook page. As things started coming together people started asking me what I was going to do with everything when it was done. It was awkward to not have an answer. I spoke to you about my desire to show, and so when I was offered this opportunity it was a great relief. I really had wanted to show them as a collection, and being able to go through this process with someone I knew was a great comfort to me. I graduated from Moore in 2009. After being completely removed from the art community for five years, showing my work and having so many people come through the space was absolutely surreal.
When we spoke on the phone this afternoon, you told me how much of a positive reaction you were getting from my work. My work is detailed, it was time consuming and sometimes irritatingly tedious to make. At times, there is so much pressure to make art quickly to be ready for a deadline. Like you have said, "Four strokes of paint and a pile of objects on a floor, doesn’t always scream a well developed thesis." Many people, especially folks outside of the art world can’t relate to work like that. I honestly made these pieces for myself. In the heat of my bad, under-grad attitude, I said that I made art as an unexplainable compulsion. It wasn't a particularly useful thing to say… but, it still rings true for me. I make them for myself, but with a desire to share a moment in time. I'm making things to talk about an experience, to share a feeling or a vision. The point of art is to communicate something. It has been vital to me to make sure the viewer wants to spend some time looking at the work. I want them to come away feeling something or thinking about something after looking at my work… and I want them to go back and look again.
Kelsey Costello and Terri Saulin Frock met when Kelsey was a BFA student at Moore College of Art & Design from 2006-09. At that time, Terri was an Adjunct Faculty member at Moore. Costello lives and works in Seattle, Wa. "Uncontained" is Costello’s first solo exhibition. Frock is still teaching art and is celebrating her fifth year as a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia.
An Uncontained Reflection by Chip Schwartz:
There are two types of vessels in this world: those we cherish and those we trash. Ikea mugs and their kin might fall somewhere between priceless vases and Styrofoam, but the handmade and the disposable constantly tug at our collective conscience. Kelsey Costello explores this dichotomy and much more by delving into concepts of history, consumer culture, and aesthetics with her solo show “Uncontained” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Costello’s series of ceramic containers, adorned with locations as varied as an oil field and the New York City subway, present viewers with a delicately crafted vision that is as enchanting as it is astute.
Clay pottery represents one of the oldest and most plentiful subsets of archaeological relics on earth. These artifacts have provided historians with insight into the artistic styles, technology, and even the diets of ancient peoples from a multitude of geographical areas. Sometimes these objects take the form of humble grain storage canisters, other times they are decorated with designs or narrative elements. Greek vases, for instance, helped to preserve examples of ancient Hellenic painting, countless other specimens of which were lost to the ages. Costello seems similarly intent to use her ceramics as vehicles for portraying impressions of contemporary life.
Although we might be tempted to extoll the virtues of our great society, Costello does not shy away from criticism in her depictions as well. Each one of her forms is embellished with collage elements and paint, resulting in gorgeously composed, three-dimensional landscapes. One all too recognizable sight is the disposable, takeout coffee cup that has become a staple of practically every café and gas station in America. While biodegradable options may exist in more progressive locales, the waste from these pervasive, one-use caffeine canteens is undoubtedly mounting in landfills that lie conveniently out of view of the average consumer.
On the outside of “Oklahoma,” shaped like an oversized to-go cup, we do not find the verdant Starbucks logo, however it does make an appearance elsewhere in the show. Instead, cumulus clouds and blue skies hover over an expanse of grain fields, inexplicably dotted with cows and massive oil well pumpjacks. This absurd, mixed-use factory farmland demonstrates the breadth and urgency with which humans guzzle up resources and seize valuable space. Throwaway coffee cups might be extremely easy to chug and chuck on the way to work, but Costello deliberately hauls the means of production back into the open, whether or not we want to look.
It is important that Costello's artworks stand as an antithesis to cheap, mass-produced goods. They are, in effect, a challenge to both wastefulness and materialism by demonstrating the power of intention, composition, and personality in the things we construct or consume. Nothing in this show has a shelf life and, like the vestiges of antiquity, items like this will only acquire additional value throughout time. Despite the fact that these pieces are not exactly functional, perhaps their presence is impetus enough to purchase a ceramic mug from a local artist instead of consistently investing in future garbage.
For the record, not everything on display here is apparently a social stance or a grand statement; in fact these points may even be a digression. These vessels dig deep at the core of human creative capacity. Existing as both sculptures and paintings, they rely on an appropriative mix of pop cultural impudence and art historical decorum, with a strong undercurrent of poetic reflection.
Looking at the tall cup by the window, its disregard for appeasing highbrow standards makes it a standout as far as content is concerned. Named “Kimmy K” for the shameless Kardashian and wife of Kanye West, the images take us off guard when surrounded by other more attractive artworks. The setting is a dark movie theater full of plush red seats, many occupied by Kardashian clones and a single version of her rapper beau in profile. As a reflection of our time, this cup is relevant in its acknowledgment of celebrity media obsession and the ubiquity of distant personalities in our daily lives, whether we like it or not.
Other pieces are significantly more informed by art history than by more recent cultural phenomena. Since many of these assemblages draw from a wide swath of source material, it is difficult to pin down any specific inspiration for a single work, but art historical allusions sneak up often during a stroll around the exhibit. There are black and white cutout repetitions in works like “Subway Open” and “Subway Closed” that hearken back to Dada collages, mottled skies with a vaguely Post-Impressionist feel in “Oklahoma,” and a wavy, somewhat hallucinatory firmament above strawberry fields in “California” that splits the difference between styles from the 1960s and topographic contour maps.
Needless to say, Costello did not limit herself when selecting elements to blend into her creations, so much so that merely calling them 'ceramics' does the artist's imagination a great injustice. If we turn toward her Starbucks storefront in “4th and South,” it becomes evident that Costello also has the power of a poet in her ability to translate the mundane into striking imagery and visual motifs. We catch ourselves spying through a second story window (with just a little bit of glare) to catch a glimpse of a man intently working on his computer. All around, wallpaper prints spread across the awning and sidewalk as if these materials naturally possessed such patterns. On this street the sublime spills out onto even the unassuming concrete.
With just a sprinkle of Pop Art pixels, the piercing colors and gestures in “San Antonio Carnival” initially read like a wholly non-objective rendering. This abstracted view of highway overpasses postures itself so distantly from “Kimmy K” that their presence in the same show is almost incredulous... and yet Kelsey Costello pulls it off. Traveling between California and New York while straddling aesthetics from ancient Athens to the present day is a daunting task, but it all connects in “Uncontained,” and it all starts with clay.
- Chip Schwartz
