Joseph Desler Costa

Knee Highs

2019

Joseph Desler Costa is an American-Italian artist who works in photography, video and new media. Costa’s practice explores ideas of consumerism, pop culture, nostalgia and desire. His works often use the language of commercial imagery to examine the aesthetics of material culture, notions of luxury and the ways in which perceptions of reality bend under the forces of commerce. Employing multiple exposures, re-photography, cut paper constructions, as well as die-cut layered prints, Costa produces photographs and films that appear almost entirely machine-made, revealing, questioning and embracing illusions of transcendence and transformation offered by mass production and consumerism. Costa’s photographic works are held in numerous permanent collections, including the Leonard Lauder Collection in New York City, the Cleveland Clinic Art Collection in Cleveland, Ohio, the BNY Mellon Collection in New York City, the Bidwell Collection, New York City and the collection of the International Center of Photography in New York City, among others. Costa has curated and organized a number of exhibitions, books and zines including group exhibitions at Baxter St. Camera Club of NY and Foley Gallery, New York City. In 2014, Costa founded the imprint Silent Face Projects. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography. He holds an MFA from ICP-Bard College and attended the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in Cuba.