From Adam Ryder’s interview with Joseph Desler Costa for Humble Arts Foundation:
Ryder: Looking at the images as a whole, I’m reminded of the Christopher Williams retrospective at MoMa, The Production Line of Happiness, from 2014. Like Williams’, you’re also producing clean, tack-sharp images that make reference to commercial product photography. However, Williams’ work is a détournement of this mode – his aims are to skewer late capitalism and materialism. Your images seem to do the opposite; instead working within and expanding upon the visual language of advertising photography, fetishising the products pictured in your works and imbuing them with, as you mentioned to me, a kind of transcendent spirituality. What do these works imply, if anything, about your beliefs about material culture and consumerism?
Desler Costa: I think we live in a world where truth and image are no longer concrete things. For better or worse, everything is more flexible and malleable in a way. Consumerism offers a promise of something better. It usually never delivers, but believing in it can sometimes be a comfort. It at least offers up the idea of transformation. We re-imagine and re-invent ourselves constantly as an effect of images we see and digest. It’s scary but also beautiful that we have this opportunity.
Browse the series “Particle Paradise” at ClampArt
Browse all of Joseph Desler Costa’s work at ClampArt