From the conversation between Gregory Eddi Jones and Joseph Desler Costa for In the In-Between:
[Gregory Eddi Jones]: So I want to talk about your current exhibition at ClampArt called Dream Date. To start, what inspired the title of the show?
[Joseph Desler Costa]: As I was making the work, I began to realize it was about this idealized and smoothed out mix of nostalgia, visual memory and desire. A lot of those memories are from my teenage years, and as I was thinking back, this very teen idea of imagining a perfect partner or activity you might do with someone came to mind. We live in a world where everything is curated around us and for us—algorithms curate social media and news feeds to our tastes which in turn influence our future tastes. We’re caught in this circle where we seek out and expect perfection—an ideal partner, place, job and life.
Idealized and imagined reality leave little room for what is actually happening. This is the way that way advertising works, so rather than fight this, I thought, why not embrace it and let it creep into the pictures.
Browse the exhibition “Dream Date” at ClampArt
Browse all of Joseph Desler Costa’s work at ClampArt