Mo Costello: Forming sounds with my mouth to approximate something that’s like a flood

February 6 – April 26, 2025

Mo Costello’s exhibition consists of two distinct though interrelated parts, each attentive to potential for social gathering.

Situated Accommodation, Costello’s site-specific, permanent intervention to ACP’s exterior entryway, results from the artist contending with the three-inch rise that rendered the gallery inaccessible, and thus inappropriate for hosting the audience Costello’s work summons. Concerned with responsiveness and relationships, Costello designed the angled steel tread ramp through an iterative process involving extensive consultation and local collaboration.

“Welding everything but the crack of dawn and a broken heart” reads neighboring Fred Martin Welding Co’s social media slogan. What happens if we depend on each other instead of the state, and your neighboring welder is a poet who goes rogue, and the building has a three-inch rise? The resulting ramp is bureaucratically unpermitted, collectively improvised, and perfectly accessible.

Inside the gallery, a series of small-scale silver gelatin prints detail clusters of staples on telephone poles throughout Georgia. Each staple echoes a trace of the initial flyer’s impulse: to reach into a public sphere, initiate contact, collide with a stranger. The accumulated staples speak in sumptuous vibration, post-language. Costello’s camera frames the cacophonous field. The sound travels beyond the container.

– Katz Tepper

Press Release & Exhibition Checklist.

Mo Costello (b. 1989) is an artist and educator drawn to the social life of objects. Costello’s working practice revolves around the maintenance of small-scale, community-supported infrastructure for the visual and performing arts. Curatorial and studio-based efforts emerge – and often converge – from within this ongoing commitment to place-based inquiry and infrastructures of care. A recent recipient of residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2024) and Denniston Hill (2024), Mo lives in Athens, GA.